History of the American Frontier
by Frederic L. Paxson
Summary
Frederic L. Paxson took up the subject that had defined his predecessor at the University of Wisconsin, where he succeeded Frederick Jackson Turner in 1910, and built a full narrative history spanning the frontier from 1763 to 1893, the year Turner himself had marked as the frontier's effective close. Where Turner had argued the frontier's influence in a single landmark essay, Paxson set out to narrate the whole process in detail: the often violent encounters between settlers and Native nations, the economic pressures that pushed migration westward decade after decade, and the practical business of building new communities on land that had belonged to someone else first.
Paxson's particular strength, compared with earlier frontier histories, was his attention to the people actually making the move west rather than to the static geography of any one place they settled, treating westward migration as a continuous social and economic process rather than a series of separate regional stories. The book follows settlement from the colonial backcountry through the plains and mountain west, tracking how each new wave of migration reshaped the political and economic structures that had governed the wave before it, all the way to the frontier's formal closing that Turner had already declared in 1893.
Reading the book means following a historian working directly in Turner's shadow but building something more comprehensive and more socially attentive than a single essay could ever be, a full scholarly narrative rather than an interpretive argument. It suits a reader who wants the whole sweep of westward expansion laid out as connected history, violence, economics, and social change together, rather than the frontier treated as an abstract force shaping American character from a distance.
Historical Context & Significance
History of the American Frontier won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for History the year after its 1924 publication. Paxson wrote it while holding the same University of Wisconsin professorship Frederick Jackson Turner had held before him, a direct institutional link to the historian whose 1893 frontier thesis had defined the field Paxson was now working to expand into full narrative history.
Paxson later moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932, where he taught until 1947, and served as president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, the organization that later became the Organization of American Historians. He went on to apply the same careful, socially attentive method to a three volume study of American democracy during the First World War, published between 1936 and 1948, the year of his death, extending into the twentieth century the same interest in how large historical forces actually moved through ordinary people's lives.