Emerson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and the Problem of the West

Abstract: In 1847–48 Emerson journeyed to Great Britain, lecturing first in industrial cities in the north, then in London, during a time of socio-economic transformation and political unrest. In the next several years he would travel extensively through cities, towns, farmlands, and forests in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. My focus in this essay is on how Emerson’s experiences in England and the Midwest combined to shape his vision of Anglo-American civilization as expressed first in the lecture “The Anglo-American” (1852–1855; published 2001), then in English Traits (1856), and on how his judgment of Western democracy and its influence on American character comports with, and can be illuminated by, historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s career-long engagement with Western democracy in the studies collected in The Frontier in American History (1920).