Joseph Schafer was Oregon's first academically trained, professional historian, serving on the faculty of the University of Oregon for twenty years. While in Eugene, he wrote what became a classic textbook on Pacific Northwest history. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner’s at the University of Wisconsin, Schafer remained a defender of Turner's famous "frontier thesis" of American history—which ascribed the nation's profoundly democratic, innovative, and individualistic tendencies to the frontier experience—long after many historians had turned against it.