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I would like to start by agreeing with AJ’s post, especially his point that Turner’s work is useful and that it does a great job of paying tribute to the pioneers who first tamed “the frontier”. I also think that Eli has done a fantastic job of highlighting the flaws in Turner’s work, and so I will not be focusing on that. Instead, I would like to highlight what I view as one of Turner’s greatest strengths, his importance in his own time in establishing the field of western history and inspiring a new generation of historians.
One of the biggest criticisms of Turner is his focus on white male frontiersman and ignorance of racial minorities and women. I think that this must be excused because Turner was writing in a time when these groups were not a focus of historical literature. It also is important to focus on Turner’s influence in mentoring a new generation of historians. Cronon himself admits that Turner was massively beneficial in “shaping as it did a generation of scholars.” (Cronon 161) I don’t think it is too great of a jump to think that Turner’s dramatic and sweeping writing style helped to draw in this new generation of students.
Finally, I found myself thinking back to some of our in-class discussion of disaster as a triggering mechanism for revealing flaws in societal systems. Turner’s frontier thesis has been widely amended and criticized, and in the process a there is now a wide range of strong historical analyzes of the American west. Without Turner to to prompt such a response, who knows if we would have current body of work on the history of the American west?
I really enjoyed reading Turner’s essay and feel that it prompted me to think about a region and period of American history that I often overlook.