Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage, Wisconsin, U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino, California) was an American historian best known for the “frontier thesis.” 

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams. Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. 

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins, had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents. Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history. He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. 

Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism, inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.