More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the colonial frontier turned European emigrants into American democrats. Having crossed the Atlantic, colonists plunged into a wild world of dense forests and savage people. In braving the dangers and seizing new opportunities, the newcomers gradually shed their European heritage, which valued cohesion, tradition and hierarchy. These newly made Americans would come to cherish individualism, innovation, equal legal rights, and the unequal economic results of geographic and social mobility. With his “Frontier Thesis,” Turner codified a...
