Reexamining Turner's Frontier Thesis: Connecting Labor and Nature

• In Event: Connecting Work and Nature: New Approaches, Methods, and Archives

Abstract

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 "Frontier Thesis" described the progression of European civilization across the American continent. His argument was influential, nationalistic, Eurocentric, and racist but also underdeveloped. Generations of historians have expanded upon and criticized Turner but more recent scholarship in environmental history and the history of capitalism show that, in fact, Turner barely scratched the surface in his analysis of frontiers. He did not understand the potential of frontiers as analytical tools.

This presentation argues for an expanded conception of frontiers which show how frontiers connect the historical phenomena of labor and nature into a synthetic historical narrative of American environmental and economic history. This synthetic connection is a goal that many labor and environmental historians have been trying to attain for at least the last three decades. Through an examination of the history of the expanding American "frontier," mining, whaling, broiler chicken production, and lumbering, this paper argues that extraction began on frontier lands where non-human natural sources of value were often abundant. When the land was stripped of the most obvious sources of value, extraction often continued, but frontiers moved into the labor process as extractors found new sources of nature to exploit within technology and working bodies, human and animal alike. In the process we see capitalism acting on and through the land and working bodies in the same way to create value for some people at the expense of other "things."

Author

• Jason L Newton, University of North Carolina at Charlotte