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Frederick Jackson Turner

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• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
• Weber State University - Biography of Frederick Jackson Turner
• National Humanities Center - The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

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Frontier Thesis

Article by D.R. Owram

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited December 16, 2013

The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. In Canada the frontier thesis was popular between the world wars with historians such as A.R.M. LOWER and Frank UNDERHILL and sociologist S.D. CLARK , partly because of a new sense of Canada's North American character.

Since WWII the frontier thesis has declined in popularity because of recognition of important social and cultural distinctions between Canada and the US. In its place a "metropolitan school" has developed, emphasizing Canada's much closer historical ties with Europe. Moreover, centres such as Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa had a profound influence on the settlement of the Canadian frontier. Whichever argument is emphasized, however, any realistic conclusion cannot deny that both the frontier and the ties to established centres were formative in Canada's development.

See also METROPOLITAN-HINTERLAND THESIS .

Recommended

Laurentian thesis, metropolitan-hinterland thesis.

The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present 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 have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

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2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

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• Published: April 2003
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Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

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• Library of Congress
• Research Guides

European Studies : Ask a Librarian

Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.

• Matthew Young, Reference Specialist, Latin American, Caribbean & European Division

Note: This guide is adapted from an earlier version, which first appeared on the European Reading Room website in 2002.

Created:  March 12, 2024

Last Updated: March 12, 2024

Meeting of Frontiers was a project, originally funded by the United States Congress, devoted to the theme of the exploration and settlement of the American West, the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the meeting of the Russian-American frontier in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. You can find more information about the project here as well as the related digital collection.

A conference dedicated to "Meeting of Frontiers" was held at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2001, taking place over three days from May 17th to May 19th. The event was sponsored by the Library of Congress, the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Open Institute of Russia and the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Bringing together scholars and experts from the United States and Russia, the conference featured presentations related to the themes of "Meeting of Frontiers," such as Russian and American frontier history, the Russian-American company and Russian Orthodoxy in Siberia and Alaska.

This guide contains the presentations given at the "Meetings of Frontiers" conference. There are presentations in English and Russian. The presentations are organized according to the sessions of the conference. It should be noted that Session III of the conference consisted of a live demonstration of the "Meeting of Frontiers" website and, thus, is not represented in the guide.

• Next: Opening Remarks >>
• Last Updated: Apr 4, 2024 1:39 PM
• URL: https://guides.loc.gov/meetings-of-frontiers-conference

Frontier Thesis

"The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. It was entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The "Turner thesis" or "frontier thesis," as his argument quickly became known, shaped both popular and scholarly views of the West (and of much else) for two generations. Turner stated his thesis simply. The settlement of the West by white people - "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" - was the central story of American history. The process of westward expansion had transformed a desolate and savage land into modem civilization. It had also continually renewed American ideas of democracy and individualism and had, therefore, shaped not just the West but the nation as a whole. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States." The Turner thesis shaped the writing of American history for a generation, and it shaped the writing of western American history for even longer. " (quoted from "Where Historians Disagree: The 'Frontier' and the West" in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Chapter 16)

• Turner thesis text
• Turner biography from The West by PBS

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/103/turner.htm

Turner's thesis can be considered:

• as a reflection of the 1890s,
• as a statement of American expansionism,
• as an idea in American thought,
• as an historical philosophy, and
• as the site of debate over the meaning of the "frontier" in American culture.  

Science in the making

Myth and mysticism in space, how the spiritual utopian pull in russia and colonial manifest destiny desires of the u.s. have shaped modern-day discussions of human spaceflight..

The Space Race was a contest of ideologies. Cosmonauts and astronauts played the part of soldiers on a bloodless battlefield, pitting communist and capitalist principles against one another in a fight for intellectual supremacy.

The two sides of the Cold War each developed rationales to explain the importance of space in their nationalistic goals. Soviets could tap into their country’s lengthy record of imagining our future in space, and believed that science and progress would bring about the perfection of humankind. At the same time, Americans relied on an idyllic rendering of the past, with a fortifying frontier that molded its people into rugged individuals.

Each view is flawed, relying on idealizations and simplifications to underpin its reasoning. Yet these dreams remain powerful, and proponents continue to invoke them in modern spaceflight discussions.

The Russian line of thought has contributed to spaceflight’s spiritual side, the idea that liberation from Earth will allow humanity to redeem itself and begin anew. U.S. advocates have provided spaceflight with a mythic framework — in exploring, we better the lands we conquer and ourselves in the process. Under the hood, the explanations are more alike than different. Together, they represent the best we hope to achieve as we make our way toward the heavens.

Spiritual Origins

Human spaceflight begins with Russia. No other modern country has had as long and detailed a history of thinking about our lives among the stars. In the late 19th century, during the waning days of its imperial power, Russia was undergoing rapid industrialization and had a populace hooked on the latest Jules Verne novels from France. From this world emerged a noble-class thinker named Nikolai Fyodorov, the first prophet of spaceflight, espousing a philosophy known as Cosmism.

Much of Fyodorov’s work centered around the idea of resurrection. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, he believed that Christ’s gift of resurrection at the End of Days and everlasting life thereafter was the ultimate incarnation of God’s love. Witnessing the tremendous power of science and engineering at work around him, he foresaw a day when human beings would be like gods and would use their supremacy to reanimate the dead generations of the past.

“The organism is a machine and consciousness relates to it like bile to the liver,” Fyodorov wrote in his Philosophy of the Common Task . “So reassemble the machine and consciousness will return to it.”

According to Fyodorov’s theory, a dead person is essentially a collection of particles that have broken apart. But, if you could bring all those particles back together, a human could once again emerge. The problem is that some of these particles — especially those from our really ancient ancestors — have escaped the Earth and scattered across the universe.

Therefore, Fyodorov wrote, humankind must band together in a common task; launching into space to collect the ashes of the deceased and building off-world habitats to house all our newly resurrected relatives. Using science and technology, we could assume absolute control over irrational nature, placing it under sensible human regulation to prevent anyone from dying ever again. To Fyodorov, this was the only moral way for “the human mob with its mutual push and struggling” to “become a harmonious force.”

Though little known today, Fyodorov’s mystic visions directly influenced many later Russian spaceflight proponents, perhaps none more important than Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The son of a rural forester and teacher, Tsiolkovsky had grown up in the remote town of Izhevskoye and survived a bout of scarlet fever at age 10 that left him hard of hearing. After falling behind in his studies, he spent three years at the Moscow library, where he met daily with Fyodorov. He later wrote that the elder philosopher “for me took the place of university professors.”

Tsiolkovsky is now known as the patriarch of Russian spaceflight. Working most of his life in obscurity on the outskirts of Kaluga, a city 200 kilometers southwest of Moscow, he drew up designs for space stations, airlocks, life support systems, and multi-stage rockets — the kind that would later carry Apollo astronauts to the moon. In 1898, he wrote a mathematical paper, Investigation of Cosmic Space by Reactive Devices , that introduced the rocket equation, which mathematically describes the movement of vehicles in space.

Due to his reclusive nature and because many believed his ideas to be odd, Tsiolkovsky’s work languished for decades. It was only near the end of his life in the 1930s that the Bolshevik government resurrected Tsiolkovsky’s findings and canonized him among the saints of spaceflight.

But less well-known than his scientific and mathematical treatises are Tsiolkovsky’s philosophical ideas. Much like Fyodorov before him, Tsiolkovsky entertained a messianic philosophy that combined occultism, evolution, and Christianity. “At a fundamental level, Tsiolkovsky was a religious thinker whose life was an attempt to reconcile the scientific views of nature that seemed to contradict his strong faith in Christ,” wrote space historian Asif Siddiqi in The Red Rocket’s Glare: Spaceflight in the Soviet Imagination .

Tsiolkovsky believed that all matter was made from a single substance and that atoms were living organisms. Human immortality and utopia would be found when we ventured among the stars. (Though, like many of his time, he harbored racist ideas that perfection required the eugenic extinction of the “lowest races [such as that] of a negro or an Indian.”) This weaving together of science and mysticism is perhaps best exemplified in Tsiolkovsky’s most well-known quotation: “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one can not forever live in the cradle.”

Siddiqi argues that this is a mistranslation. The Russian word rendered ‘humanity’ —  razum  — also means the ‘human mind’ or, most literally, ‘reason.’ Tsiolkovsky was not merely imploring us to leave behind the Earth; he was arguing we must outgrow rationality in order to explore the cosmos.

The Early Craze

After the fall of the czarist government in Russia in 1917, the mystical roots of spaceflight were mostly forgotten. The Soviets who eventually triumphed were not interested in spiritualism or religion, but in rational order and progress. Yet Communism was a utopian project and the next stage of spaceflight advocates easily adopted the same evangelical tones as those that preceded them.

During the 1920s, Russian society was swept up in a space craze where many ordinary citizens became convinced that interplanetary travel was just around the corner. A newspaper article from the time entitled “Is Utopia Really Possible?” described the pioneering rocket designs of the German Hermann Oberth and American Robert Goddard, leading to rumors that the U.S. was planning to soon launch a spaceship to the moon. The frenzy spurred Russian media to rediscover Tsiolkovsky’s work and devote considerable attention to space.

Moscow university students formed the world’s first spaceflight advocacy club, whose members traveled around the country delivering speeches about mankind’s destiny among the stars. A prominent activist painted glorious pictures of “senior citizens [who] will find it much easier to maintain health in [space],” and the “inhabitants of Mars [whose] inventions could help us to a great extent to become happy and well off.”

In 1927, Moscow hosted the first world’s fair dedicated to space travel, featuring an elaborate display of a planet with blue vegetation and orange soil. One attendee was so caught up that he wrote in the fair’s guest book, “I am going to accompany you on the first flight. I am quite serious about this. As soon as I heard what you had done, I tried in every way to make certain that you would take me with you. Please do not refuse my request.”

In their talks and publications, this second crop of spaceflight advocates swore fealty to science and technology, believed that humanity must master nature, and reasoned that a perfect society could be achieved once we left our earthly troubles behind. Some were directly inspired by Fyodorov, such as the Anarchist-Biocosmist collective, which issued a manifesto declaring the right to exist forever and the right to unimpeded movement through the cosmos as fundamental human privileges.

This period helped plant the seeds of Russia’s early lead in the Space Race, and the Soviets of that era also often adopted utopian rhetoric in discussions of spaceflight. But the craze itself fizzled out after a decade. Many citizens realized that the fanciful rockets being described were years away from being a reality. The Bolshevik government never fully endorsed the early spaceflight groups, citing their lack of scientific rigor. Russia soon lost its post-World War I optimism. Stalinist purges and widespread poverty eventually erased this chapter from most people’s minds.

American Myths

Meanwhile, in 1893, at the Chicago World’s Fair, a historian named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a thesis that has been called “the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history.” Turner argued that up until 1880 the U.S. had a contiguous edge, a frontier line on its western border beyond which lay untamed wilderness. Data from the Census Bureau showed that by the late 1800s this frontier had been so broken up by settlements that such a line had more or less disappeared. For Turner, this was a bad thing.

As he wrote in The Significance of the Frontier in American History :

“The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought… strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion… Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe… The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”

At the frontier, where civilization meets savagery, rugged individuals thrive and domesticate the wild, making it fit for human habitation. Through this struggle, they are transformed, becoming newer, better, and more democratic than what came before. Turner’s Frontier Thesis combined with the 19th century belief in Manifest Destiny to give a new American mythos; the U.S. brought the bright light of civilization westward, and extended its own powers of freedom in the process.

No one could have delivered a more effective narrative to spaceflight advocates during the 1960s heyday of the American Space Age. After all, Turner’s western frontier was closed. But now there was space, the final frontier.

“This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space,” said John F. Kennedy during his famous 1962 Moon Speech at Rice University. The German rocket scientist and architect of the Apollo program, Werner von Braun, stated that America’s “pioneer settlers were daring, energetic, and self-reliant. They were challenged by the promise of unexplored and unsettled territory, and stimulated by the urge to conquer these vast new frontiers.” Von Braun insisted that Americans needed a space frontier both physically and spiritually, and that moving beyond Earth offered “a chance to organize a new interplanetary society, and make fresh beginnings.”

The second part of Turner’s argument — that the frontier allows for the creation of a new and better world—paralleled the visions of Russian spaceflight advocates. “[I]t is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of people can escape from their neighbors and from their governments, to go and live as they please in the wilderness,” wrote physicist Freeman Dyson in the late 1950s in A Space Traveler’s Manifesto . A 1975 NASA study about setting up giant cylindrical space stations saw good in “the sense of hope and of new options and opportunities which space colonization can bring to a world which has lost its frontier.”

Implicit in this view is the great American myth of reinvention, which suggests that we can leave behind the Old World and emerge as something totally different. It’s a nice story, though flawed, relying on the idea that our current circumstances represent a clean break from the past. But no matter how hard people try, the past can not be ignored — its triumphs and scars will always remain written on the present.

Though monumentally influential, Turner’s thesis no longer gets much traction among historians. It would be nice if U.S. history were so tidy as to be driven entirely by self-reliant settlers pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But the westward expansion of the U.S. is also tainted by the subjugation and destruction of autonomous peoples, the exploitation of land and labor, and belligerence against other nations in order to conquer their territory.

Individualistic pioneers were there, but so was the federal government, guiding patterns of settlement, extending land grants to railroad and telegraph corporations, and keeping law and order in its new jurisdictions. Reducing all these different actors and actions to a morality play where everything was done for the greater good of the nation’s psyche is more than a little simplistic. The Frontier Thesis made for effective propaganda, driving imperial American expansion as well as U.S. spaceflight, but ultimately fails to match up with actual history.

Heavenly Thoughts

Because of their role as seers, space advocates tend to tread in the same waters as religious figures. “From the beginning human space exploration has represented as much as anything else a spiritual quest, a purification of humanity, and a search for absolution and immortality,” wrote space historian Roger Launius in Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion .

Even today, visionaries continue to probe pious lines of thought. Our species will be gone in 1,000 years “without escaping beyond our fragile planet,” said physicist Stephen Hawking. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has said that “we’ll either be a multi-planet species and out there among the stars, or a single-planet species until some eventual extinction event, natural or man-made.”

Yet the cosmos is a hostile place, and the notion that we can use space to outrun death is a leap of faith. Weightlessness eats away at astronauts’ bones, radiation depletes their health. It remains to be seen whether humans can successfully gestate and develop on worlds other than Earth. Even if these problems get solved, new ones are sure to arise. We will face our mortality out there just as much as from here.

A religious tone is also introduced into spaceflight when people promise a better tomorrow if we leave our planet behind. “Each time pioneers expanded into new realms they discovered the old ways wouldn’t work… History has repeatedly shown that these changes in behavior, technology and culture were necessary for the society as a whole to remain vital,” wrote Rick Tumlinson, founder and director of the Space Frontier Foundation, a spaceflight advocacy group. Colonizing Mars is “an opportunity for a noble experiment in which humanity has another chance to shed old baggage and begin the world anew; carrying forward as much of the best of our heritage as possible and leaving the worst behind,” declares the Mars Society, whose members embrace interplanetary settlement.

The utopian school offers salvation and hope, a reason to get through the struggles that plague us today. But it also prompts many questions. How would we make sure that exodus from Earth preserves only the positive aspects of human life? In what way will relentlessly moving elsewhere ease the complications in our hearts? To imagine the future as only better (or only worse) reduces it to something that reality could never produce. Tomorrow will contain the best of times and the worst of times, just like today, just like yesterday.

Adam Mann is a freelance science writer living in Oakland, California whose work has appeared in Nature, Wired, and New Scientist. He likes space, physics, and riding his bike.

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