Imagining the west - Thesis Example

The proclaimed ideological objective of Early American expansionists was to secure living space in the entire American West for the whites agricultural settlement by cleansing the new space for “whites” through the displacement of the Native Americans (Carroll 8). The ‘American West” involved racial-imperialist continental territorial expansion incorporating ‘taking’ indigenous’ land by force (Carroll 43). In 1893, Jackson Frederick Turner, a historian of the American West, expressed that frontier and westbound expansion served numerous purposes.

The frontier acted like the “safety valve” reducing overpopulation by allowing Americans to free land. Moreover, the frontier exhibited new financial or economic opportunities as people searched for resources and land to exploit with the goal to guarantee prosperity (Koetzing 4). Turner’s Frontier Thesis accounts factors in the course of American imperialism since it crystallizes many of the desires and hopes that Americans had in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Koetzing 5).

According to Turner, the frontier was "the gathering, meeting, point in the middle of civilization2 and savagery". Turners idea of the frontier enveloped ideas of progress, conquest, and individual accomplishment or achievement. Turners concept resonates with the definition of what it is to be an American today: he believed that the advancements of American settlements westwards with the conquest or triumph of landscape clarified American development (Koetzing 6) Turners frontier myth, the "gathering, meeting, point between of civilization and savagery", characterized the American’s relationship with the natural world found and misused for the name of advancement.

The West availed the free land on which democracy and equality based system could thrive. The present of a continuously growing frontier was to account for remarkable American qualities: "the presence of a zone of free land, its consistent