Historians of the Frontier West

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Between 1880 and the mid-1920s, western American historiography emerged to became a major ingredient in American historical writing. During this period historians such as Francis Parkman, Hubert H. Bancroft, Justin Windsor, Josiah Royce, and Frederick Jackson Turner helped shape what the American Frontier West and what it signified.

Much of the early Western Frontier History was a reaction to the history being taught at the turn of the twentieth century. One of the “first professional frontier historians, Frederick Jackson Turner, felt that the history being taught (during the early 20th century) stopped at the Alleghanies. Turner later asserted, “the fundamental, dominating fact of United States history [was] the expansion of the United States from the Alleghenies to the Pacific.” He felt that the frontier or the westward movement of Europeans forged into them the traits that made them uniquely American.

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All the material was published in 1924 or earlier and has passed out of copyright protection, although some of the books have been reprinted.