The Frontier in American History Quotes

“That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom - these are the traits of the frontier.”
― Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History

“Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a place on the historian’s page.”
― Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History

“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”
― Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History

“Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.”
― Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History

“In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man.”
― Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History