Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) was an American historian whose frontier thesis shaped the study of United States history for half a century. Born in Portage, Wisconsin, he studied at Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins and taught at Wisconsin and then Harvard. His 1893 paper The Significance of the Frontier in American History argued that free land and westward expansion, rather than European inheritance, explained American democracy and character. He wrote relatively little, but The Frontier in American History and The Significance of Sections in American History, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, collect his main work. He ended his career at the Huntington Library in California.