Self-government and modernity

Historians rank Frederick Jackson Turner as one of the most noted of all American historians. In 1893, in Chicago at the American Historical Association, he delivered a paper he entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and in it, he argued that the frontier shaped the American character.

Turner insisted that on the frontier pioneers dropped their European characteristics and values, and picked up a respect for democracy, an intolerance of social hierarchy, a distrust of authority, and a dependency upon local political organizations. Not all, but many historians then a...