![]() The kind of Americanism Turner represented took all the unbounded optimism that went into the founding of the United States and bet that the country’s progress, moving forward on the frontier and into the world, would reduce racism to a remnant and leave it behind as residue. But what became known as Turner’s Frontier Thesis-which argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of “free land” created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism-placed a wager on the future. ![]() military was engaged in deadly counterinsurgencies in the Caribbean and Pacific. Mexican workers were being lynched in Texas, and the U.S. “Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.” 1 Expansion across the continent, Turner said, made Europeans into something new, into a people both coarse and curious, self-disciplined and spontaneous, practical and inventive, filled with a “restless, nervous energy” and lifted by “that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” Turner’s scholarly career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the height of Jim Crow and the consolidation of anti-miscegenation and nativist exclusion laws, with the KKK resurgent. ![]() “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society,” he wrote in 1893. Poetry was the language of the frontier, and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner was among its greatest laureates. ![]()
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