Fredrick jackson turner's frontier thesis, orientalism, and the austrian militärgrenze

Abstract

Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” is seen as seminal in signalling a new chapter in United States history, at one and the same time seeking to define the process of Americanization while also championing a new American identity, both distinct and distinctive. Turner’s “frontier thesis” was presented little over ten years after another Frontier, the Habsburg Militärgrenze, or military frontier, was dissolved after over 350 years of existence. Yet the dissolution of the Habsburg frontier did not result in any such claims of significance for the longest military frontier in Europe. What did appear was a body of commentary and literature influenced by Romanticism and orientalism. This article reflects on the nineteenth-century popular and literary understanding of the Militärgrenze and calls for further investigation into the significance of the Habsburg frontier in Central European history.