No text has been more influential with regard to the writing and debating of western American significance than Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The elastic and contradictory terms of Turner's analysis are largely responsible for the chorus of debate in the last three decades about whether the West is best understood as an idea, a place, or a historical process – and what kind. While Turner has had perhaps the greatest influence on American historiography of any American historian, he is also the most discredited. “Because Turner's frontier thesis necessarily ended in 1890,” writes William Cronon, “it left historians few clues about what to do with the West in the twentieth century: in an odd sense, Turnerian western history almost literally ended at the very moment that Turner created the field.” It also left Americans few clues about what to do with democracy if its supposed source was gone.