Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Other Essays

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Albin J. Cofone ◽  
John Mack Faragher
1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin T. Katzman

Beyond influencing generations of scholarship in American history, the paradigm of Frederick Jackson Turner has stimulated a series of monographs and articles on the role of the frontier in the formation of other societies. A synthesis of this comparative research on these frontier societies has been ably undertaken by Gerhard and Mikesell. While there have been numerous articles in both English and Portuguese on the Brazilian frontier, these largely descriptive studies have not been systematically integrated into any conceptual framework, much less the comparative tradition inspired by the Turner thesis. In this essay, I propose to test the robustness of the frontier paradigm against some Brazilian frontier experiences


2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Mattson

Mention James Harvey Robinson and most students of American history will think two words: “New History.” Robinson tried to articulate what better-known historians of the period – Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington – were doing in their research and writing. As Richard Hofstadter explained, the leading historians of the Progressive Era tried “to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment.…They attempted to find a usable past related to the broadest needs of a nation fully launched upon its own industrialization, and to make history an active instrument of self-recognition and self-improvement.” Situated firmly in the “revolt against formalism” that marked Progressive Era intellectual work, historians made their research instrumental, teasing out what William James called the “cash value” of ideas. Historical writing could no longer, in Robinson's own words, “catalogue mere names of person and places which have not the least importance for the reader.” Rather, it had to “help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind.” In those words and his pioneering (though largely forgotten) work in European and intellectual history, Robinson codified the purpose of what has come to be known as Progressive history.


Leviathan ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 147-177
Author(s):  
José Bento De Oliveira Camassa

La Australia argentina (1898), livro de viagem de Roberto Payró (1867-1928), escritor, intelectual socialista e repórter do importante jornal La Nación, de Buenos Aires, retrata a Patagônia mais de uma década depois da Conquista do Deserto (1879-1885). Em uma visão inspirada pelo determinismo geográfico e pela obra “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) do historiador estadunidense Frederick Jackson Turner, Payró identifica na região um potencial civilizacional subaproveitado, em função da administração política demasiadamente centralizada e da herança colonial espanhola. O autor advoga pela modernização da Patagônia por meio de uma maior autonomia política e econômica e por meio da imigração europeia, especialmente a de colonos e pioneers anglo-saxões. Payró, aliás, revela um posicionamento fortemente anglófilo, em um período de afirmação da latinidade na intelectualidade hispano-americana, no contexto da Guerra Hispano-Americana (1898).


Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-38
Author(s):  
James V. Schall

The notion of “the frontier” is a profound one in European and American history. From the Rhine-Danube line of the late Roman Empire, to the eastern medieval German forests, to the Indies beyond the seas, to the New World and the Far West, the frontier has been, as Frederick Jackson Turner once suggested, as much spiritual as geographical in nature. We are a race that has, in a very real sense, been continually shocked out of our cyclic, stability tendencies by ever new horizons, each transcending and revolutionizing our cultural visions and expectations. The early voyages of Diaz, da Gama, Columbus, John Davis and Magellan, along with the later ones of Francis Drake, Abel Tasman and James Cook, were of a piece with Peary's and Amundsen's discoveries of the two Poles, with the search for the Northwest Passage, with Hillary's conquest of Everest and Neil Armstrong's walk on the Moon.


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