PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY 



BY FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER 



[Frederick Jackson Turner, Professor of American History, University of Wiscon- 

 sin, Madison, Wisconsin, b. November 14, 1861, Portage, Wisconsin. A.B. 

 University of Wisconsin, 1884; A.M. ibid. 1888 ; Ph.D. Johns Hopkins Univer- 

 sity, 1890. Instructor, University of Wisconsin, 1885-88; Assistant Professor, 



ibid. 1889-91; Professor of History, ibid. 1891 ; Professor of American 



History, ibid. 1892 ; Lecturer in History in Harvard University, 1904. 

 Member Council of American Historical Association, Massachusetts Historical 

 Society, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Curator State Historical Society of 

 Wisconsin. Author of various monographs and documentary collections in 

 Reports of American Historical Association, and American Historical Review.] 



A catalogue of specific problems which await solution in American 

 history is, I am sure, not expected. Such a list would be altogether 

 too large for the limits assigned to this paper, even if it were a 

 desirable undertaking in itself. I prefer to discuss some larger lines 

 of reconstruction of United States history, some points of view from 

 which it may be approached, in the belief that such an estimate 

 may be of service in presenting tests for determining the relative 

 importance of our problems and in bringing into view some neg- 

 lected fields of study and neglected methods of investigation. 



In many ways the problems of American history differ from those 

 of Old World history. The documents are, for the most part, recent, 

 and exist in comparative abundance, although scattered and in- 

 completely collected. Our problems with respect to material are 

 therefore not primarily those of the technique of verification and 

 criticism of scanty documents, but are chiefly those of garnering 

 the scattered material, printed and written; making bibliographies 

 and indexes; and, in general, rendering available for historical 

 workers the sources for understanding our development. The Ameri- 

 can Historical Association, through its various committees, the 

 Library of Congress, the Carnegie Institution, and other agencies 

 have already inaugurated important work in finding and listing 

 archives and manuscripts. But very much remains to be done in 

 these respects, for material that would be of inestimable service 

 to the historian is daily disappearing, and the existing material is 

 inadequately known and used. The lack of systematic bibliographies 

 of the documents in the various states of the Union, in the national 

 archives and libraries, and in the foreign countries with which we 

 have come in contact, or from which we have derived our origins, is 

 much to be regretted. Comparatively moderate expenditures by 

 historical societies and by the state and national governments to 

 perfect their documentary collections and to make them known, 



