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¶ … American Frontier and American Political Culture: What if anything has the frontier contributed to creating a distinctive American political culture?
The notion of a vast and limitless space known as the 'frontier' is a particularly unique aspect of our national political culture, a luxury of space and ideology enjoyed by America alone. Unlike the nations of Europe, only America has had a notion of an expansive, ever-stretching and vast territory with virtually elastic boundaries connected to its civilized, original core of thirteen colonies. The historian Frederick Turner once wrote: "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."(Turner, Chapter 1) America may have began as colonies, but its enrichment and spirit of capitalism is founded on a notion of colonizing a great and unsettled, uncivilized frontier.
True, the Native peoples of the Americans may have possessed the original and legitimate claim over such territory in retrospect....
And in the ideology of the American frontier, the West existed as a vast expanse, to which all Americans could flee to uncharted and unlawful places and make their fortunes. "Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnishes the forces dominating American character." (Turner, Chapter 1) Primitive and pristine, the frontier in the American imagination was a place of masculine proving ground, where men could live, free from the civilizing constraints of laws and marriage.
This notion of the frontier reinforced the notion that government, any government or restriction by law was bad, and that all men…
Work Cited
Turner, Frederick. The Frontier in American History. Last Modified 1997. [7 May 2005] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/
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