Abstract
THE AMERICAN FRONTIER has long been the object of historical inquiry. Even before Frederic Jackson Turner reshaped the field in the early 1890s with his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, the frontier already occupied a special place in the American imagination. Indeed, much of nation's written history to that point centered in one form or another on the westward movement of Euro-American newcomers and the collision of cultures that occurred along the borderlands of the United States. Turner expanded on that narrative in an attempt to make sense of the processes at work along the frontier and, for better or worse, to assess the frontier's impact on the development of the American nation. Jackson prefaced his analysis by asserting that the physical frontier had come to an end; in essence, however, the scholarly study of the frontier was just beginning.
