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Frederick Jackson Turner's groundbreaking and controversial essay is based on his definitive thesis, "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American developmen ....

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... to government -- would find its roots directly in European heritage. Turner disagreed with the "germ" theory, believing that environmental influences were much more important in historical development that hereditary influences. Turner could not account for the history of his own state of Wisconsin purely in terms of "germ" theory because of the profound influence of Native American Indian culture in the region. Turner said that "the frontier divided the primitive from the civilized, the natural from the institutional, the savage from the cultured, the elemental from the complex." (Simonson, p.9) Though at first, the wilderness maste ...