Frederick Jackson Turner Overlooked the Ladies

sweep across the South. We must be careful not to underestimate how creative such hybrid institutions can be. The perception of the miraculous nature of the camp meeting changed over time, of course, and it ultimately became a routinized revival instrument. Turner, along with Mode and Sweet, led us to overvalue the role of the frontier. In reaction, we must not overvalue and isolate particular practices that were imported to the frontier. The historian's task is never to simplify the past but rather to see multiple causes and complex interactions. We have moved beyond the Turner thesis even thoughtruth be told-we still seldom employ definitional precision when we discuss the frontier. But Turner's ideas, and the counter-interpretations they have inspired, have caused a great outpouring of analytical effort to be focused on frontier religion. As a result, our understanding of the phenomenon has become far more sophisticated as we have learned how to contextualize what happened, for example, at Cane Ridge. History is largely the art of enhancing and enriching the number of connections we see between one event and others removed in time, geography, and domain. Frederick Jackson Turner, his disciples, and his critics together have widened the range of interpretative connections in the study of American religion

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