In 1890 the Superintendent of the Census found it was no longer possible to draw a line to mark the frontier in the American West. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner used the occasion of that bureaucratic's announcement to undertake his analysis of the defining role that the frontier had played in the making of American society and institutions, in his famous paper The Significance of the Frontier in American History in 1893. A century later, the Turner thesis is being subjected to intense revision by scholars, many of whom view the history of the frontier and of the West through the prism of gender, race, ethnicity, and class, or from an environmental perspective.