The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

1A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893. It first appeared in the Proceedings of the Stale Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, with the following note: "The foundation of this paper is my article entitled ' Problems in American History,' which appeared in The JEgis, a publication of the students of the University of Wisconsin, November 4, 1892. ... It is gratifying to find that Professor Woodrow Wilson     whose volume on ' Division and Reunion' in the Epochs of American History Series, has an appreciative estimate of the importance of the West as a factor in American history     accepts some of the views set forth in the papers above mentioned, and enhances their value by his lucid and suggestive treatment of them in his article in The Forum, December, 1893, reviewing Goldwin Smith's ' History of the United States.'" The present text is that of the Report of the American Historical Association for 1893, 199-227. It was printed with additions in the Fifth Year Book of the National Herbart Society, and in various other publications.

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