American Historical Association in the context of Carlton J. H. Hayes

The Frontier Thesis, also known as Turner's Thesis or American frontierism, is the argument by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the settlement and colonization of the rugged American frontier was decisive in forming the culture of American democracy and distinguishing it from European nations. He stressed the process of "winning a wilderness" to extend the frontier line further for U.S. colonization, and the impact this had on pioneer culture and character. Turner's text takes the ideas behind Manifest Destiny and uses them to explain how American culture came to be. The features of this unique American culture included democracy, egalitarianism, uninterest in bourgeois or high culture, and an ever-present potential for violence. "American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier," wrote Turner.

In this view, the frontier experience established the distinctively American style of liberty contrasted to deferential European mindsets still affected by the expectations of feudalism. It eroded old, dysfunctional customs. Turner's ideal of frontier had no need for standing armies, established churches, aristocrats, or nobles; there was no landed gentry who controlled the land or charged heavy rents and fees. Rather, pioneers went and claimed territory for themselves using only loose organizations, and the toughness of the experience gave them discipline and self-sufficiency that would be handed down over generations, even after the frontier advanced beyond the old boundaries. The Frontier Thesis was first published in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", delivered to the American Historical Association in 1893 in Chicago. He won wide acclaim among historians and intellectuals. Turner elaborated on the theme in his advanced history lectures and in a series of essays published over the next 25 years, published along with his initial paper as The Frontier in American History.

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is a seminal essay by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner which advanced the Frontier thesis of American history. Turner's thesis had a significant impact on how people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries understood American identity, character, and national growth. It was first presented to a special meeting of the American Historical Association at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois in 1893, and published later that year first in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, then in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association. It has been subsequently reprinted and anthologized many times, and was incorporated into Turner's 1920 book, The Frontier in American History, as Chapter I.

The essay summarizes Turner's views on how the idea of the American frontier shaped the American character in terms of democracy and violence. He stresses how the availability of very large amounts of nearly free farmland built agriculture, pulled ambitious families to the western frontier and created an ethos of unlimited opportunity. The frontier helped shape individualism and opposition to governmental control. He argued that the westward migration and the settlement of new frontiers were transformative processes that shaped the idea of American exceptionalism.

Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff, or Rostovtsev (Russian: Михаи́л Ива́нович Росто́вцев; November 10 [O.S. October 29] 1870 – October 20, 1952), was a Russian historian whose career straddled the 19th and 20th centuries and who produced important works on ancient Roman and Greek history. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1935. He was also a member of the Russian Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Peter Joachim Gay (né Fröhlich; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (The Rise of Modern Paganism); Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).

Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is a 1989 book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The volume made The New York Times Best Seller list, was the 1991 winner of the Royal Society's Rhone-Poulenc Prize and the American Historical Association's Forkosch Award, and was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer juror Joyce Carol Oates later revealed the non-fiction jury had unanimously recommended the book for the prize, but the selection was rejected by the Pulitzer board. Gould described his later book Full House (1996) as a companion volume to Wonderful Life.

Natalie Zemon Davis, CC (November 8, 1928 – October 21, 2023) was an American-Canadian historian of the early modern period. She was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. Her work originally focused on France, but it later broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. For example, her book, Trickster Travels (2006), views Italy, Spain, Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens of Leo Africanus's pioneering geography. (By 2023, the text had appeared in six translations.) Davis' books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two for The Return of Martin Guerre. She was the second female president of the American Historical Association (the first, Nellie Neilson, was in 1943).

Davis was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize and National Humanities Medal and was named Companion of the Order of Canada.

The American Historical Review is a quarterly academic history journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association, for which it is an official publication. It targets readers interested in all periods and facets of history and has often been described as the premier journal of American history in the world.

In the 2011 Journal Citation Reports, the AHR had the highest impact factor among all history journals.