| Frederick Jackson Turner |
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Frederick Jackson Turner ( November 14 , 1861 – 1932 ) was, with Charles A. Beard , the most influential American historian of the early 20th Century . Born in Portage, Wisconsin , Turner graduated from the University Of Wisconsin in 1884 , where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity, and gained his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1890 with a thesis on the Wisconsin fur trade. As a professor of history at Wisconsin (1890–1910) and Harvard (1910–1922), Turner trained scores of disciples who in turn dominated American history programs throughout the country. His emphasis' on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. His model of sectionalism as a composite of social forces, such as ethnicity and land ownership, gave historians the tools to use social history as the foundation of all social, economic and political developments in American history. Frederick Jackson Turner is best remembered today for his " Frontier Thesis ", which he first publicized on July 12 , 1893 in a Paper read in Chicago to the American Historical Association , during the Chicago World's Fair . Here, he stated that the spirit and success of the United States is directly tied to the westward expansion of the country. Turner is also famous because of his famous lecture on how the frontier had shaped American development, he concluded that the "first period" of American history—the period that had nurtured individualism, democracy, and the widespread opportunity for economic autonomy—had come to an end. He might have added that with the re-racialization of American freedom, the long era of the Civil War, when political debate revolved around the future of slavery and the fate of the former slaves, had also passed into history. Yet the questions central to nineteenth-century debates over freedom—the relationship between personal, political, and economic liberty, the role of the state in creating the conditions of freedom, and the boundaries of the "imagined community"—had not been permanently answered. He is also the author of "The Significance of Sections in American History," which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1933 . FURTHER READING
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