Frederick Jackson Turner shares his views on how the idea of the frontier shaped the American being and characteristics, through his essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". But it was challenged even before his death in 1932.
The first ones who contended or opposed his work are historians Charles Beard and Benjamin F. Wright. They thought Turner overemphasized the influence of the frontier on American culture, particularly its democratizing effects.
In 1942 Yale professor G.W. Pierson asserted that Turner exaggerated the degree that the physical environment shaped westering immigrants. Criticism of the frontier hypothesis intensified during the 1950s. Earl Pomeroy argued that settlers, rather than being creators of a new American culture, were imitators, establishing new communities based on eastern American traditions.
Ray Allen Billington (who died in 1981) on the other hand, was one of the most prolific historians of his generation, and the major defender and re-interpreter of the "Frontier Thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner.
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