In the 1893 Report of the American Historical Association, historian Frederick Jackson Turner published “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Although some of Turner’s assertions were perhaps a little overstated, the essay remains important because it essentially defined the frontier character of American life and how the frontier shaped American values and characteristics. It was an example of a new approach to historiography that historians and social scientists were beginning to take in the nineteenth century; rather than focusing on kings and popes, wars and treaties, historians were taking a closer look at how economic and social factors influenced historical events. Even in the twenty-first century, Americans tend to trace American individualism and enterprise to the “frontier thesis” Turner articulated just three years after the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed.