Frontier

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West....The frontier is the line of the most rapid and effective Americanization....The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people....The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier....The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvements and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects....But the most important effect of the frontier has been the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism....It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control....The frontier states that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older states....
To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients....What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. 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.

-Frederick Jackson Turner