Frederick Jackson Turner, considered the most important historian of the United States in the twentieth century, was born in Portage, where his father Andrew Jackson Turner was a longtime local newspaper editor and activist. He studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, earning a B.A. in 1884 and an M.A. in 1888, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he received a Ph. D in 1890. He taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1889 to 1910 and at Harvard University from 1910 to 1924 and, after a stay in Madison, became senior research associate at the Huntington Library in California from 1927 to 1932. His 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered in Chicago, reoriented the study of American history toward the nation's westward migration and its consequences. For more than half a century, his frontier thesis, together with his 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.