Turner did nothing less than reinvent American history. Before him, most people who had bothered to think about the origins of their democracy had chalked it up to the intellectual principles of Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the Founders. But Turner argued that it was born on the frontier, as Europeans—and later Americans—constructed a society on the wild edge of savagery, taming the wilderness with civilization. Turner’s actors in this drama were not a few eastern elites; they were ordinary men building democracy in the West as they tried to make a living.
