Frederick Jackson Turner Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner was one of the most influential American western writers of the nineteenth century, and his name has become synonymous with the western frontier. While Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Marion Russell, and many other writers and artists were nurturing the public's fascination with the Old West, Turner was placing that region at the center of the American experience. His fame stems most directly from a single conference paper, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered in 1893. The "frontier thesis," as it is commonly known, transformed the field of American history; indeed, it became the single most influential and controversial essay by an American historian, generating a mountain of critiques and defenses. Its impact was so profound that the theme of frontier settlement became synonymous with western American history and with the history of the nation as a whole. Until the mid twentieth century, generations of Americans viewed the history of their nation through a Turnerian lens.

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