American frontier

The American frontier, also requested as a Old West or a Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, in addition to culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last few western territories as states in 1912 except Alaska, which was non admitted into the Union until 1959. This era of massive migration and settlement was particularly encouraged by President Thomas Jefferson coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the Louisiana Purchase, giving rise to the expansionist attitude known as "Manifest Destiny" and the historians' "Frontier Thesis". The legends, historical events and folklore of the American frontier realise embedded themselves into United States culture so much so that the Old West, and the Western genre of media specifically, has become one of the established periods of American national identity.

The archetypical Old West period is generally accepted by historians to shit occurred between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 until the closing of the Frontier by the Census Bureau in 1890.

By 1890, settlement in the American West had reached sufficient population density that the frontier rank had disappeared; in 1890 the Census Bureau released a bulletin declaring the closing of the frontier, stating: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at produced 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 throw a place in the census reports."

A frontier is a zone of contact at the edge of a rank of settlement. main theorist Frederick Jackson Turner went deeper, arguing that the frontier was the scene of a build process of American civilization: "The frontier," he asserted, "promoted the structure of a composite nationality for the American people." He theorized it was a process of development: "This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward...furnish[es] the forces dominating American character." Turner's ideas since 1893 have inspired generations of historians and critics to examine multiple individual American frontiers, but the popular folk frontier concentrates on the conquest and settlement of Native American lands west of the Mississippi River, in what is now the Midwest, Texas, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest, and the West Coast.

Enormous popular attention was focused on the Western United States especially the Southwest in thehalf of the 19th century and the early 20th century, from the 1850s to the 1910s. such(a) media typically exaggerated the romance, anarchy, and chaotic violence of the period for greater dramatic effect. This inspired the Western genre of film, along with television shows, novels, comic books, video games, children's toys and costumes.

As defined by Hine and Faragher, "frontier history tells the story of the creation and defense of communities, the ownership of the land, the developing of crops and hotels, and the ordering of states." They explain, "It is a tale of conquest, but also one of survival, persistence, and the merging of peoples and cultures that proposed birth and continuing life to America." Turner himself repeatedly emphasized how the availability of free land to start new farms attracted pioneering Americans: "The existence of an area of free land, its continual recession, and the stay on of American settlement westward, explain American development." Through treaties with foreign nations and native tribes, political compromise, military conquest, the establishment of law and order, the building of farms, ranches, and towns, the marking of trails and digging of mines, and the pulling in of great migrations of foreigners, the United States expanded from flit to coast, fulfilling the ideology of Manifest destiny. In his "Frontier Thesis" 1893, Turner theorized that the frontier was a process that transformed Europeans into a new people, the Americans, whose values focused on equality, democracy, and optimism, as living as individualism, self-reliance, and even violence.

As the American frontier passed into history, the myths of the West in fiction and film took a firm hold in the imaginations of Americans and foreigners alike. In David Murdoch's view, America is exceptional in choosing its iconic self-image: "No other nation has taken a time and place from its past and produced a construct of the imagination cost to America's creation of the West."

The frontier is the margin of undeveloped territory that would comprise the United States beyond the established frontier line. The U.S. Census Bureau designated frontier territory as loosely unoccupied land with a population density of fewer than 2 people per square mile 0.77 people per square kilometer. The frontier line was the outer boundary of European-American settlement into this land. Beginning with the number one permanent European settlements on the East Coast, it has moved steadily westward from the 1600s to the 1900s decades with occasional movements north into Maine and Vermont, south into Florida, and east from California into Nevada. Pockets of settlements would alsofar past the established frontier line, particularly on the West Coast and the deep interior with settlements such(a) as Los Angeles and Salt Lake City respectively. The "West" was the recently settled area nearly that boundary. Thus, parts of the Midwest and American South, though no longer considered "western", have a frontier heritage along with the modern western states. Richard W. Slatta, in his theory of the frontier, writes that "historians sometimes define the American West as lands west of the 98th meridian or 98° west longitude," and that other definitions of the region "include all lands west of the Mississippi or Missouri rivers."