Frederick Jackson Turner Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.

Frederick Jackson Turner
Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

Frederick Jackson Turner
So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.

Frederick Jackson Turner
That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom - these are the traits of the frontier.

Frederick Jackson Turner
American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.

Frederick Jackson Turner
And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Frederick Jackson Turner
The frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting-point between savagery and civilization... the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.

Frederick Jackson Turner
The democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has dangers as well as its benefits.

Frederick Jackson Turner
The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good and all of its evil elements.

Frederick Jackson Turner
Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit.

Frederick Jackson Turner