Frederick Jackson Turner - Early Life, Education, and Career

Early Life, Education, and Career

Born in Portage, Wisconsin, the son of Andrew Jackson Turner and Mary Olivia Hanford Turner, Turner grew up in a middle-class family. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin (now University of Wisconsin–Madison) in 1884, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.

He gained his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1890 with a thesis on the Wisconsin fur trade, directed by Herbert Baxter Adams. As a professor of history at Wisconsin (1890–1910), and later Harvard (1911–1924), Turner trained scores of disciples, who in turn dominated American history programs throughout the country. Turner did not publish extensively; his influence came from tersely expressed interpretive theories (published in articles), which influenced his hundreds of disciples. Two theories in particular were influential, the "Frontier Thesis" and the "Sectional Hypothesis".

Although he published little, he did more research than almost anyone and had an encyclopedic knowledge of American history, earning a reputation by 1910 as one of the two or three most influential historians in the country. He proved adept at promoting his ideas and his students, whom he systematically placed in leading universities. He circulated copies of his essays and lectures to important scholars and literary figures; he published extensively in highbrow magazines; he recycled favorite material, attaining the largest possible audience for key concepts; and he wielded considerable influence within the American Historical Association as an officer and advisor for the American Historical Review. 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 for all social, economic and political developments in American history. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.

Annoyed by the university regents who demanded less research and more teaching and state service, Turner sought out an environment that would support research. Declining offers from California, he accepted a call to Harvard in 1910 and remained a professor there until 1924. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1911. Turner was never comfortable at Harvard; when he retired in 1922 he became a visiting scholar at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, where his note cards and files continued to pile up, but few monographs got published. His The Frontier in American History (1920) was a collection of older essays.

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. At the American Historical Association, he collaborated with J. Franklin Jameson on numerous major projects.

Turner's theories slipped out of fashion in the 1960s, as critics complained that he neglected regionalism. They complained that he celebrated too much the egalitarianism and democracy of a frontier that was rough on women and minorities. His ideas never disappeared; indeed they influenced the new field of environmental history. Turner gave a strong impetus to quantitative methods, and scholars using new statistical techniques and data sets have, for example, confirmed many of Turner's suggestions about population movements.