Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” posited that the existence of “free land” in the West had served as a “safety valve” for the industrializing east and its waves of immigrants. The frontier, a dynamic boundary between “savagery and civilization,” had shaped a unique American identity, one in which vigorous and self-reliant people found a place for themselves in an expanding land.
