building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Association, during the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago. Turner thought
the frontier was the organising principle to interpret American history, a principle
with which he identified the most important American cultural experiences.
Whatever the limits of his interpretation may be, he clarified Melville’s intuitions
from a historiographic point of view and purged the mystical inclination towards a
“promised land” from the analysis which had been made.
In Turner’s ideology, the frontier represented the very history of colonisation and
he identified himself with the expansion into the wild spaces of the West [Figure
128].
However, at this point, the term frontier took on a rather special meaning, which
detached itself from the idea held by the inhabitants of European countries.
Whereas many people of various origins use the word as a synonym for boundary
between one nation and another, intending barrier of passage, the word Frontier
has taken on a substantially different meaning in American life and the American
language. The frontier, as Walter Prescott Webb (1888‐1963), one of Turner’s most
well‐known pupils, sustained, is not a line to stop at, but rather an area in which to
enter.
A quick look in an American dictionary will confirm the argument that the frontier is
first and foremost a region, an area defined as being sparsely populated, in contact
with the wilderness or territories, which were neither inhabited nor colonised. For
this reason the term is rarely used in the USA with other meanings. Whoever
mentioned the word frontier was aware that there was no rigid boundary around
the colonial settlements, unless during a conflict of war. There was, however,
available, open space.
The innovation of Turner’s thesis consisted in having placed extreme importance in
the ideas expressed by the frontier, and at the same time in having distanced
himself from the historiographic schools of the same period, according to whom,
the first task of the historian was to identify the “germs” of American institutions
and to retrace their origins in their respective, European, social structures.
Turner, on the other hand, identified the structure of American institutions as being
the result of a reciprocal process of adaptation between man and the uncivilised
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