Jackson's Frontier In American History

Historical Theory and Jackson’s Frontier
As explained in this chapter of Davidson and Lytle’s After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, a historical theory is not necessarily a clear and definite principle about something, rather it is an untested hypothesis. Historians incorporate many factors into their theories to help explain events and support their hypotheses, and these focuses affect their basic understanding of history. This is commonly referred to as “Grand Theory”—an overall explanation of phenomena in a particular discipline or realm of experience such as economics, sociology, or history. As we saw in the previous chapter on the Salem Witch Trials, each historian's input and perspective introduced new possibilities and explanations
Turner’s thesis discussed the significance of the frontier and how it embodied what America was all about at the time; he argued that the frontier brought out raw survival instincts and embellished nationalism, independence, and democracy. Turner’s new viewpoint was revolutionary for its time because most historians thought with an Atlantic Coast bias, believing that the East, especially New England, was the true heart of American culture and that that culture traced back to English political institutions. Turner, a rural Wisconsin native, had been unaffected by this general bias and strongly believed that the narrow perspective of 19th century Eastern-American historians neglected the broader contours of social, cultural, and economic history that had shaped American
Like a physicist’s pursuit of a unified theory to explain the universe, a historian searches for a theory that can explain all parts of history without being subject to biases of time, date, and location. I would give this chapter a 9/10 rating; by using examples not from Jacksonian-age America, but from specific historians, authors Davidson and Lytle profoundly demonstrate how theories are merely hypotheses that cannot become laws until they are proved time and time again that they are true. Like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, a historical theory cannot be proven wrong until it a specific example is found where the theory does not work. What we saw with Turner’s frontier thesis was a theory that did not work, so historians from 1893 to now have spent their lives testing their own theories based off of the weaknesses in Turner’s. “Jackson’s Frontier—and Turner’s” was a great model of how a historian’s theory can be impacted by the influences of the times they live in, and how a unified historical theory can not be achieved like a scientific one may be because no two humans think the same; consequently, no historical event can be repeated in the same way a scientist demonstrates an experiment in the lab—history must be intensely discussed and researched, and theories must be made,