Quotes from Frederick Jackson Turner

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.

The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development.

The frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting-point between savagery and civilization… the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.