Considered the most important historian of the United States in the twentieth century, Frederick Jackson Turner brought a new understanding to the meaning of the American experience. He was born in Portage; his father was Andrew Jackson Turner, a longtime local newspaper editor and civic activist. Young Turner left Portage to study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (B.A. 1884, M.A. 1888) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (PhD. 1890). He taught at the University of Wisconsin (1889-1910) and at Harvard University (1910-24) and, after a Madison stay, became senior research associate at the Huntington Library in California (1927-32). Turner's essay on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered in Chicago in 1893, reoriented the study of American history toward the nation's westward migration and its consequences. For over a half century Turner's frontier thesis, along with his own and his students' emphasis on the history of sections of the U.S., new research resources, and environmentalism, defined the American character and dominated research and teaching on the American experience.

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