The Frontier

"The most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particulary to any direct control (...)".

"There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions ; the inherited ways of doing things are also there ; and yet, in spite of environment,  and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage  of the past ; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints ans its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier".

Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier (1894).

Une version "primitive" de l'opposition entre la jeune Amérique et la vieille Europe.