In Grandin’s account, the myth associated with the unsettled frontier helped set off the Revolutionary War. Where Turner saw the frontier as a positive force, Grandin sees it as a malignant evil, a myth that encouraged racism and stimulated rapacious capitalism. Grandin, a Yale University history professor and the author of well-regarded books the slave trade and auto maker Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city, Fordlandia, has taken Turner’s concept and turned it on its head.

the simplicity of a primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”įor example, Turner believed the popularity of the frontiersman in early American culture contributed significantly to the election of Abraham Lincoln (“the rail-splitter”) and indirectly to the eventual abolition of slavery.Īs useful as Turner found the frontier, the significance of his article lay in his contention that that “ the frontier has gone and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” He based his argument on the 1890 census which concluded that because so many areas of the American west had been settled, the term “frontier” could no longer be used as a geographical construct in federal reports. Turner believed the nation’s constant expansion enabled Americans to overcome sectional and religious divisions and develop a culture that encouraged individualism, self-sufficiency, and a capitalist economy.Īccording to Turner, “this perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life…. history ever published. In it, Turner theorized that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” The article in question, The Significance of the Frontier in American History written by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, is arguably the single most important essay on U.S.

In his new book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Borders in the Mind of America, Greg Grandin has chosen as a foil a single, 130-year-old journal article to illustrates the changing perception of the American frontier and its role in promoting systematic racial violence. To establish dramatic patterns for their readers, historians often use first-person accounts, statistics or suspenseful chronologies. “History makes what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeing them in a simple form,” wrote historian Johan Huizinga some one hundred years ago.

Grandin end of the myth