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
The Southern elements continue also to reveal themselves in the
Democratic southwestern counties of Illinois, grouped like a broad delta
of the Illinois River, while northern Illinois holds a larger proportion
of descendants of the Middle States and New England. About one-half her
population is of foreign parentage, in which the German, Irish, and
Scandinavians furnish the largest elements. She is a great agricultural
State and a great manufacturing State, the connecting link between the
Mississippi and the Great Lakes. Her metropolis, Chicago, is the very
type of Northwestern development for good and for evil. It is an epitome
of her composite nationality. A recent writer, analyzing the school
census of Chicago, points out that "only two cities in the German
Empire, Berlin and Hamburg, have a greater German population than
Chicago; only two in Sweden, Stockholm and Goeteborg, have more Swedes;
and only two in Norway, Christiana and Bergen, have more Norwegians";
while the Irish, Polish, Bohemians, and Dutch elements are also largely
represented. But in spite of her rapidity of growth and her complex
elements, Chicago stands as the representative of the will-power and
genius for action of the Middle West, and the State of Illinois will be
the battle-ground for social and economic ideals for the next
generation.
Michigan is two States. The northern peninsula is cut off from the
southern physically, industrially, and in the history of settlement. It
would seem that her natural destiny was with Wisconsin, or some possible
new State embracing the iron and copper, forest and shipping areas of
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota on Lake Superior. The lower peninsula
of Michigan is the daughter of New York and over twelve per cent of
Michigan's present population were born in that State, and her traits
are those of the parent State. Over half her population is of foreign
parentage, of which Canada and England together have furnished one-half,
while the Germans outnumber any other single foreign element. The State
has undergone a steady industrial development, exploiting her northern
mines and forests, developing her lumber interests with Saginaw as the
center, raising fruits along the lake shore counties, and producing
grain in the middle trough of counties running from Saginaw Bay to the
south of Lake Michigan. Her state university has been her peculiar
glory, furnishing the first model for the state university, and it is
the educational contribution of the Northwest to the nation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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