The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Turner's thesis had a significant impact on how people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries understood American identity, character, and national growth.

He stresses how the availability of very large amounts of nearly free farmland built agriculture, pulled ambitious families to the western frontier and created an ethos of unlimited opportunity.

[2] Australian historian Brett Bowden has explored how the concept of "frontier" has been very widely used in both scholarly and popular literature to denote challenging new forces.

[3] By contrast, medievalist Nora Berend asked: "What good is a concept not very clearly formulated a hundred years ago—Turner’s frontier was an elastic term that had no sharp definition—and severely criticized ever since?

The Turner Thesis was also critiqued by Patricia Nelson Limerick in her 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.