1. Turner’s Frontier Thesis
Underline key sentences
Summarize his arguments

2. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” one of the most influential essays written in America. In it he claimed that American history had been a study of expansion and settlement of a succession of “Wests”: the West beyond the Atlantic Coast, the Appalachian West, the Old Northwest, the Mississippi Valley, the Western Plains, the Old Southwest, and the Far West.
Turner claimed that prolonged frontier experience had affected the thinking of the American people, their culture, and their institutions, and that the isolation and hardship of the frontier had fostered self-reliance, individualism, and movement away from the influence of Europe.
In each successive advance westward, the need to create civilization anew accounted for the vigor, ambition, and democracy of America. With loss of the frontier, Americans lost a critical foundation for their culture, and an era had ended with unforeseen abruptness and startling finality.