Frederick Jackson Turner and His Ghost: The Writing of Western History.

Focuses on Frederick Jackson Turner's 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History' and its continuing impact on the writing of Western history. It provided new impetus to state and local history, agricultural history, and particularly the history of the American West and of the frontier. Later historians generally assumed both the existence and the importance of the frontier, although the "new" western historians tend to be critical of Turner's thesis.