1 janv. 1890 - Frederick Jackson Turner's review of census data

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a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner reviewed recent census data and proclaimed the end of the frontier. Up until 1890, he wrote, a clear, westward-moving line had existed between “civilization and savagery.” The frontier experience, Turner argued, shaped Americans’ national character. It left them a heritage of “coarseness and strength, combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” as well as “restless, nervous energy.” But he warned that the frontier had closed and Americans would need to find new ways to build their nation and imagine its future.

Today, historians reject Turner’s depiction of Indian “savagery” — and his contradictory idea that white pioneers in the West claimed empty “free land.” Many scholars have noted that frontier conquest was both violent and incomplete. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as well as more recent cycles of drought, have repeated late-nineteenth-century patterns of hardship and depopulation on the plains. During the 1950s and 1960s, also, uranium mining rushes in the West mimicked earlier patterns of boom and bust, leaving ghost towns in their wake. Turner himself acknowledged that the frontier had both good and evil elements. He noted that in the West, “frontier liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government.” But in 1893, when Turner first published “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” eager listeners heard only the positives. They saw pioneering in the West as evidence of American exceptionalism: of the nation’s unique history and destiny. They claimed that “peaceful” American expansion was the opposite of the conquests undertaken by European empires, ignoring the many military and economic similarities between U.S. and European actions. Although politically the American West became a set of states rather than a colony, historians today emphasize the legacy of conquest that is central to its (and America’s) history.

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