Editing Frontier (section)

===American frontier===
{{Further|American frontier}}
[[File:Alfred Jacob Miller - Fort Laramie - Walters 37194049.jpg|thumb|right|The first [[Fort Laramie]] as it looked prior to 1840. Painting from memory by [[Alfred Jacob Miller]]]]
After victory the [[American Revolutionary War]] and the signing [[Treaty of Paris (1783)|Treaty of Paris]] in 1783, the [[United States]] gained formal, if not actual, control of the British lands west of the Appalachians. Many thousands of settlers, typified by [[Daniel Boone]], had already reached [[Kentucky]] and [[Tennessee]] and adjacent areas. Some areas, such as the [[Virginia Military District]] and the [[Connecticut Western Reserve]] (both in [[Ohio]]), were used by the states as rewards to veterans of the war. How to formally include the new frontier areas into the nation was an important issue in the [[Continental Congress]] in the 1780s and was partly resolved by the [[Northwest Ordinance]] (1787). The [[Southwest Territory]] saw a similar pattern of settlement pressure.

For the next century, the expansion of the nation into those areas, as well as the subsequently-acquired [[Louisiana Purchase]], [[Oregon Country]], and [[Mexican Cession]], attracted hundreds of thousands of settlers. The question of whether the [[Kansas Territory]] would become "slave" or "free" helped to spark the [[American Civil War]]. In general before 1860, Northern Democrats promoted easy land ownership, and Whigs and Southern Democrats resisted the [[Homestead Acts]] for supporting the growth of a free farmer population that might oppose slavery and for depoulating the East.

When the Republican Party came to power in 1860, it promoted a policy of a free land, notably the Homestead Act of 1862, coupled with railroad land grants that opened cheap (but not free) lands for settlers. In 1890, the frontier line had broken up; census maps defined the frontier line as a line beyond which the population was under 2 persons per square mile.

The impact of the frontier in popular culture was enormous, as shown in [[dime novels]], [[Wild West shows]], and after 1910 [[Western film|Western films]] that were set on the frontier.

The American frontier was generally the edge of settlement in the West and typically was more democratic and free-spirited in nature than the East because of the lack of social and political institutions. The idea that the frontier provided the core defining quality of the United States was elaborated by the great historian [[Frederick Jackson Turner]], who built his [[Frontier Thesis]] in 1893 around the notion.