Frederick Jackson Turner

(1861 - 1932)

Born in Portage, Wisconsin, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a lecture titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, declaring that “to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness…that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” His “frontier thesis”—especially his belief that the frontier was now gone—guided the framing of American history for decades. In 1932, a few months after Turner’s death, his former student Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech recycling the thesis for a new economic context: “Traditionally, when a depression came, a new section of land was opened in the West; and even our temporary misfortune served our manifest destiny.”