Turner’s Frontier Doctrine and Its Impact on American Politics

Abstract

Frederick Jackson Turner, a prominent American historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published The Significance of the Frontier in American History in 1893, which received widespread attention after its publication, creating the Frontier School, which dominated American history for more than four decades. Turner’s “frontier doctrine” was informed by an expansionist ideology that profoundly influenced the governing philosophy of American dignitaries and the expansionist policies pursued by the United States.