The Significance of the Frontier in American Constitutional Law

Abstract

On the evening of July 12, 1893, at the American Historical Association’s annual conference, an unknown thirty-one-year-old history professor from the University of Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his first academic paper. As occurs with most professorial debuts, nothing about the audience’s immediate reaction suggested that the occasion would eventually prove momentous. Far from it: Turner’s fellow historians greeted him with the yawning indifference typically accorded novice professors from the provinces. The paper received a similarly bleak reception from the leading scholarly journals, which all but ignored Turner and his ideas for three full years following the presentation. From these humble academic origins, it must have appeared implausible