This hugely influential work marked a turning point in US history and culture, arguing that the nation’s expansion into the Great West was directly linked to its unique spirit: a rugged individualism forged at the juncture between civilization and wilderness, which – for better or worse – lies at the heart of American identity today. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

In the 46 years between 1886 and 1932, Frederick Jackson Turner left his indelible stamp on the theory, practice, and profession of American history. These three essays - "The Significance of History", "The Frontier Thesis" and "The Sectional Thesis" - demonstrate Turner's erudition, eloquence and foresight.

Despite a half century of attempts by social scientists to compare frontiers around the world, the study of these regions is still closely associated with the nineteenth-century American West and the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. As a result, the very concept of the frontier is bound up in Victorian notions of manifest destiny and rugged individualism. The frontier, it would seem, has been tamed. This book seeks to open a new debate about the processes of frontier history in a variety of cultural contexts, untaming the frontier as an analytic concept, and releasing it in a range of unfamiliar settings. Drawing on examples from over four millennia, it shows that, throughout history, societies have been formed and transformed in relation to their frontiers, and that no one historical case represents the normal or typical frontier pattern. The contributorsÑhistorians, anthropologists, and archaeologistsÑpresent numerous examples of the frontier as a shifting zone of innovation and recombination through which cultural materials from many sources have been unpredictably channeled and transformed. At the same time, they reveal recurring processes of frontier history that enable world-historical comparison: the emergence of the frontier in relation to a core area; the mutually structuring interactions between frontier and core; and the development of social exchange, merger, or conflict between previously separate populations brought together on the frontier. Any frontier situation has many dimensions, and each of the chapters highlights one or more of these, from the physical and ideological aspects of EgyptÕs Nubian frontier to the military and cultural components of Inka outposts in Bolivia to the shifting agrarian, religious, and political boundaries in Bengal. They explore cases in which the centripetal forces at work in frontier zones have resulted in cultural hybridization or Òcreolization,Ó and in some instances show how satellite settlements on the frontiers of core polities themselves develop into new core polities. Each of the chapters suggests that frontiers are shaped in critical ways by topography, climate, vegetation, and the availability of water and other strategic resources, and most also consider cases of population shifts within or through a frontier zone. As these studies reveal, transnationalism in todayÕs world can best be understood as an extension of frontier processes that have developed over thousands of years. This bookÕs interdisciplinary perspective challenges readers to look beyond their own fields of interest to reconsider the true nature and meaning of frontiers.

In 1893 a young Frederick Jackson Turner stood before the American Historical Association and delivered his famous frontier thesis. To a less than enthusiastic audience, he argued that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development"; that this frontier accounted for American democracy and character; and that the frontier had closed forever with uncertain consequences for the American future. Despite the indifference of Turner's first audience, his essay would soon prove to be the single most influential piece of writing on American history, with extraordinary impact both in intellectual circles and in popular literature. Within a few years his views had become the dominant interpretation of the American past. A collection of his essays won the Pulitzer Prize, and for almost half a century, Turner's thesis was the most familiar model taught in schools, extolled by politicians, and screened in fictional form at local movie theaters each Saturday afternoon. Now, a hundred years after Turner's famous address, award-winning biographer John Mack Faragher collects and introduces the pioneer historian's ten most significant essays. Remarkable for their truly modern sense that a debate about the past is simultaneously a debate about the present, these essays remain stimulating reading, both as a road map to the early-twentieth-century American mind and as a model of committed scholarship. Faragher introduces us to Turner's work with a look at his role as a public intellectual and his effect on Americans' understanding of their national character. In the afterword, Faragher turns to the recent heated debate over Turner's legacy. Western history has reemerged in the news as historians argue over Turner's place in our current mind-set. In a world of dizzying intellectual change, it may come as something of a surprise that historians have taken so long to overturn the interpretation of a century-old conference paper. But while some claim that Turner's vision of the American West as a great egalitarian land of opportunity was long ago dismissed, others, in the words of historian Donald Worster, maintain that Turner still "presides over western history like a Holy Ghost.". Against this backdrop, Faragher looks at what the concept of the West means to us today and provides a reader's guide to the provocative new literature of the American frontier. Rereading these essays in the fresh light of Faragher's analysis brings new appreciation for the richness of Turner's work and an understanding of contemporary historians' admiration for Turner's commitment to the study of what it has meant to be American.