American frontier

The shifting zone between established settlements and less-settled lands in the United States. Its westward movement involved Indigenous dispossession, migration, settlement, and changing ideas about national identity.

Manifest Destiny: The nineteenth-century belief that the United States was destined to expand across North America. It supplied a popular justification for territorial expansion and settlement.
Thirteen Colonies: The British colonies on the Atlantic coast that declared independence in 1776 and formed the United States. Their inland edges formed early settlement frontiers before independence.
Frederick Jackson Turner: An American historian who argued that the frontier shaped United States democracy and national character. His 1893 thesis made the frontier a powerful framework for interpreting national history.
Frontier thesis: Frederick Jackson Turner's argument that successive frontiers shaped American institutions and national character. It is a historical interpretation of frontier influence, not the frontier itself.
Indian Removal Act: An 1830 United States law authorizing the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from lands east of the Mississippi River. Removal cleared land for white settlement and shifted the frontier westward.
Northwest Ordinance: A 1787 law establishing a process for governing and admitting new states from lands northwest of the Ohio River. It shaped how frontier territories became states and extended federal authority.
Sacagawea: A Lemhi Shoshone woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition as an interpreter and guide. Her role connects westward exploration to Indigenous knowledge and diplomacy.
American exceptionalism: The belief that the United States has a distinctive national character or historical mission. Turner's frontier argument offered one explanation for the supposed distinctiveness of American society.
Homestead Act: A 1862 United States law offering public land to settlers who occupied and improved it. Its land grants accelerated migration and farming across western territories.
Louisiana Purchase: The 1803 acquisition of a vast territory from France that roughly doubled the area of the United States. It moved the imagined and political frontier far beyond the Mississippi River.

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