The Frontier in American HistoryTurner, Frederick Jackson
History
The Frontier in American History
Turner, Frederick Jackson
Frontier and pioneer life -- United States; Frontier thesis; United States -- History; United States -- Territorial expansion
In these transforming years since 1860, Ohio, finding the magician's
talisman that revealed the treasury of mineral wealth, gas, and
petroleum beneath her fields, has leaped to a front rank among the
manufacturing States of the Union. Potential on the Great Lakes by
reason of her ports of Toledo and Cleveland, tapping the Ohio river
artery of trade at Cincinnati, and closely connected with all the vast
material development of the upper waters of this river in western
Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Ohio has become distinctly a part of the
eastern social organism, much like the State of Pennsylvania. The
complexity of her origin still persists. Ohio has no preponderant social
center; her multiplicity of colleges and universities bears tribute to
the diversity of the elements that have made the State. One-third of
her people are of foreign parentage (one or both parents foreign-born),
and the city of Cincinnati has been deeply affected by the German stock,
while Cleveland strongly reflects the influence of the New England
element. That influence is still very palpable, but it is New England in
the presence of natural gas, iron, and coal, New England shaped by blast
and forge. The Middle State ideals will dominate Ohio's future.
Bucolic Indiana, too, within the last decade has come into the
possession of gas-fields and has increased the exploitation of her coals
until she seems destined to share in the industrial type represented by
Ohio. Cities have arisen, like a dream, on the sites of country
villages. But Indiana has a much smaller proportion of foreign elements
than any other State of the Old Northwest, and it is the Southern
element that still differentiates her from her sisters. While Ohio's
political leaders still attest the Puritan migration, Indiana's clasp
hands with the leaders from the South.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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