Frederick Jackson Turner writes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Frederick Jackson Turner writes - Essay Example The immigration of people of various ethnic backgrounds mostly Europeans into the region led to their transformation. They cultivated adopted and spread their culture and notions in west America. Thus, through these processes, they become Americanized. According to Jackson Turner, the long established American character originated from the forests and gained momentum every time it reached a frontier thus the frontier thesis. The American character entails democracy, equality, optimism, individualism, violence, and self-reliance (Turner 1). I agree with Turner that America owes its identity from the west. First, the Middle States, as well as the South, possessed democratic ideas and this formed the center of Ohio politics in her early history. This is proved since most of its members elected in the Ohio legislature in 1820 comprised a large number of the natives. For example, New England contributed nine Senators as well as six Representatives who mainly came from Connecticut. Moreove r, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania elected seventeen Senators as well as twenty-one Representatives majority who came from Pennsylvania (Turner 1). Further, the South elected twenty-seven Representatives and nine Senators most of whom came from Virginia. Among the Representatives, five of them were natives of Ireland. In total, the emigrants from the Middle Region and the Democratic South outnumbered the Federalist who originated from New England. Since America is the heart of democracy and Ohio was the first state to elect emigrants as representatives, then it shows that the idea of democracy in America arose from Ohio, which is in the frontier. Secondly, once the immigrants settled in the West, they cooperated among themselves in clearing land, building houses and barns, and establishing communities (Froner 337). These ideals of individualism spread from the west into other areas in America. Thus, the communities promoted selflessness within their communities which later