Frederick Jackson Turner is best known as the father of the "Frontier (or Turner) Thesis," but he also generated a "Sectional Thesis" which had a considerable impact on historians and historiography. In addition, although little-remembered for working in the field of diplomatic history, Turner edited a greater body of work in this area than in any other.

Freddie, as he was known as a child and as students later would laughingly call him among themselves, was born on 14 November 1861, the youngest child of Andrew Jackson Turner and Mary Olivia Hanford Turner. The ancestors of both parents were of New England Puritan stock, the Turners having arrived in Massachusetts in 1634 and the Hanfords in Connecticut in 1642. On both sides of the families, there were numerous preachers, and in the best tradition of the frontier thesis, both families gradually westered, Jack Turner meeting Mary Hanford at Portage, Wisconsin, in 1858. Two...