 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Preuss, and in this lecture, we're going to look at the thesis developed by Dr. Frederick Jackson Turner and the birth of American Western history. Turner developed his thesis and we want to know why it's important. So in this lecture, we're going to look at Turner's thesis, provide a summary of it, explain why it's so important, and look at new directions that historians have gone in since Turner's thesis. Now when we talk about theory, a lot of people think history is, you know, like one damn thing after another. Well, there's also hypothesis, there's also thesis behind history. History is interpretation. And so theory players play a part in that. But the idea that theory, as in this quote, a body of theorems presenting a systematic view of an entire subject, has kind of gone out of style. We call this a meta-narrative, and as far as here, historians are concerned, we're in a post-modern age. Most historians don't see one big theme connecting all aspects of history together. So we've kind of moved away from that idea. Now we do believe that they help build a conceptual framework and that they help us ask questions and then in answering those questions that we ask, so that does help us. But we have to remember that theories are shaped by our present world view and actually anything we do in history is shaped by our present world view. It's how we interpret the past through our eyes today. Now that doesn't mean we project our values on the past. Historians try to avoid doing that. But it does mean that because it is really history is seen through today's eyes, there's always going to be reinterpretation, always going to be reanalysis, and it's always going to be redone. So let's look at Frederick Jackson Turner, his photograph is here. In 1893, the Chicago World's Columbia Exposition, this was a World Fair, the American Historical Association, a new organization at the time was meeting and Turner delivered a presentation about the significance of the frontier in American history. Now he based this off of a report by the superintendent of the 1890 census and the superintendent had written in the census that up until the 1890s, you could see on maps a frontier line and these frontier lines were marked by population of more than two people per square mile. That was the demarcation line. And what he said is that up to and including 1880, that census, the country had a frontier line of settlement. But currently by 1890 there had been so much settlement in so many different unsettled areas that that line was broken now and there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. Then he said that the frontier line can no longer have a place in census reports. Now this statement concerned Turner. And what Turner did, influenced by this 1890 census and influenced by the Darwinist at the time, remember Darwin in 1860 developed this theses of evolution, and so he kind of applied, Turner kind of applied this idea of evolution to American history. And he said that the frontier is the central theme of American history. That American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. So you have this idea of the evolution of American society. And he saw frontier as process, this idea of wherever there was a change going on between the people who were indigenous and the new people moving in, this was where the frontier was. And he also saw it as progress, this idea that American history, well, that any history, is a unfolding of progress as it should be. He also believed, and another reason why he's important, is that he sees American history from an American perspective, not a continuation of European history, as many historians before Turner had seen it, that, you know, you brought over these Germanic people who settled in this new world, and they were just extending their concepts, their traditions. Now what he said, Turner, was that we need to look at it as an evolving American perspective of history. He also noted that whenever you look at what the frontier is, it's the outer edge of the wave of the meeting point between savagery and civilization. And he said the frontier was constantly evolving because it's this continual struggle of man versus nature, and that's what creates American people. So an idea of nationalism, an idea of independence, an idea of democracy, he also said that the frontier was necessary because it was a safety valve. When civilization got too crowded, you could always move people west, and that also affected American culture. Since then, people have disagreed mightily with Turner. Turner's view of history, a lot of his critics have said, and you had critics very early on, said it was too Anglo-centric and only focused on European migration. It only focused on American white Anglo-Saxon Protestant expansion, that it was too male oriented, that it only focused on men and women were left out of the process altogether, that it had this idea of progress, that American history was unfolding towards the better. Now this is a very what we would call a wiggish interpretation of American history. The things were always getting better, and this comes out of the British term of the wigs, and also an American political term, the wigs. And it was this idea that progress was always happening, that history was the unfolding of this planned progress. And he looked at the frontier as being process driven. It was this process of change of savagery and civilization meeting, and wherever that was, that's where the West was, that's where the frontier was. But new historians almost immediately came up in the 1920s and 30s with the West as a place. For example, Herbert Eugene Bolton, in his book The Spanish Borderlands said, instead of looking at it from a European or New England perspective, we need to look at American history from the Spanish perspective. The Spanish had colonized and settled the New World a hundred years before the British or the French came over. And so we needed to look at it from a Southwestern perspective, not a New England perspective, American history that is. And then you have Walter Prescott Webb, another historian, a Texas historian, his book The Great Plains looked at the West as a place. In the West you had the role of environment, playing in a very important role because it was always dry, people were fighting against drought, they were fighting the rugged different types of soil, the rugged environment, and it was the role of environment in history was new, and Webb was one of the first to come up with this and the idea of the West shaping the environment, and the environment shaping the West. Since then, since about the 1980s, we've seen what is sometimes called the New Western history, and this was looking at race, class, and gender, and trying to infuse those elements into American history of the West. And Patricia Nelson Limerick, one of the books you're reading, The Legacy of Conquest, was a pioneer in that effort. In 1987, she said the West was where these cultures met, but there was a conquest, there were people who were victors, there were people who were victims, and yet we needed to look at those ideas. And so this brings in a lot of issues of race and class to Western history. Richard White in his book, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, he said that the West is a place where we should not look at the idea of frontier, and in fact he never uses the word frontier in his book, showing a market transition from Turner's idea of the frontier in the American history process. And so White never uses it trying to get totally away from Turner, but not everybody has been so lucky, and a lot of people start off Western history with Turner's thesis and go from there. And so if you want to summarize what we've talked about this morning, we're looking at Turner's thesis that it was an idea of American culture, society, and government is rooted in that frontier experience, that idea of the ever-changing frontier experience, and so the frontier is central to American history. And if we want to explain its significance, Turner not only called for an American interpretation of history, but he laid the foundation of course for the history of the American West. And since Turner, new directions have evolved, and historians have started looking at the West as a place instead of a process. They have looked at the multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class conflict and cooperation going on in the West. They have looked at the hardship and the promise of the West. And so there's always new avenues for divergence from Turner's thesis and new ways of looking at Western history, and hopefully we'll explore some of those in this course. Thank you very much.