The End of the Wild West and Turner’s Frontier Thesis

THE FRONTIERIn 1893 the American Historical Association held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As the site of both Frederick Jackson Turner?s legendary speech, ?The Significance of the Frontier in American History,? and the celebration of the Exposition in Chicago as the ?horizontal? ?White City? of ?the future,? this provocative affiliation was meaningful for many reasons.  Perhaps the most notable reason was what each suggested about what it meant to be an American in 1893.  Turner?s speech at that World?s Fair not only lamented the official closing of the American frontier by the Census Bureau in 1890 but in the speech Turner was obsessed with the role of the frontier in the formation of a distinctly American national identity.(1)All of this had more than a little significance for the then embryonic international Baha?i community which in 1893 was planning to send its first pioneers to the USA from the Middle East.  In 1893, too, the name of Bah??u?ll?h, the Founder of the Bah?'? Faith Who had died the previous year in Palestine, was first mentioned in Chicago on the American continent by Dr. Henry H. Jessup at the Parliament of Religions held in conjunction with that Columbian Exposition.  Chicago became, for the Baha?is, that ?White City? in a way quite unpredictable in 1893.  When the Mother temple of the West was completed in 1953 in Chicago it signalled the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth for a world religion which by that year had some 200,000 adherents, ninety per-cent of whom lived in Iran.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) Catherine Gouge, ?The American Frontier: History, Rhetoric, Concept,? Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Spring 2007, Volume 6, Issue 1.Of pomp and circumstance, of any manifestations of public rejoicing or of popular applause, there were none to greet this first intimation ofthe existence and purpose of the newRevelation proclaimed by Bah??u?ll?h.Announced through the mouth of anavowed supporter of ecclesiasticism,(1)of the narrow variety which this Faithitself had challenged & sought in timeto extirpate; characterized at its birth asa heterodox and obscure offshoot of acontemptible creed, the Message of theMost Great Name is now fed by streams of unceasing trial and warmed by bright sunshine from more than a century of atender and loving care.  It is now driving its roots deep into America?s genial soil with a wonderful and thrilling motion all over the world of existence as a Kingdomof God enters the end of its sixth decade!!(1) Dr. H.H. Jessup, a Presbyterian missionary in the Middle East for 54 years; he died in 1910.Ron Price12/2/?10