LSU's Fleming Lecture series was established in 1936 and is named in memory of Walter Lynwood Fleming, a former professor of history at the school who distinguished himself as a scholar of the Reconstruction period.  In the nearly nine decades since their founding, the lectures have helped revise many of the interpretations held by historians, including those of Professor Fleming, and have come to testify to the changing nature of the southern past and southern history.  The 1940 Fleming Lecture was delivered by Thomas P. Abernethy, the Richmond Alumni Professor at the University of Virginia.  A native of Alabama, Abernethy (1890-1975) was educated at the College of Charleston and Harvard University.  At Harvard he trained under Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the famed Frontier Thesis that held that the movement west of the frontier exerted a shaping influence on American democracy and American character. Abernethy served as a professor of early American history at a number of universities before a distinguished career at the University of Virginia. He mainly taught early American colonial history that concentrated on the southern states, their notable figures, frontier life, the move westward, and how it impacted the social, economic, and political fabric of colonial America and its transition into an independent nation.  Abernethy was a founder and president of the Southern Historical Association (1934) which is dedicated to the promotion of interest and research in Southern history. Chief among his numerous well received historical publications are: The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815-1928 (1922); From Frontier To Plantation in Tennessee, A Study in Frontier Democracy (1932); The Burr Conspiracy (1954),The South in the New Nation, 1789-1819 (1961); and Southern Frontiers of the War of 1812 (1967). For sale, Abernethy's Three Virginia Frontiers (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1940).  Hardcover, dust jacket, 1st ptg. In this work Abernethy examined the longstanding idea, the brainchild of his mentor Frederick Jackson Turner, that American democracy is largely the product of the frontier as it applied to the migration of early Virginians from Jamestown to the tidewater, piedmont, and transmontane regions of the Old Dominion which are representative of the American frontier as a whole. In contradiction to Turner Abernethy found that in Virginia the democratizing influence of the frontier was largely offset by such countervailing factors as European customs and traditions, English legal systems, and the methods by which the public lands were disposed of.  As the book notes point out:  "This significant study of the failure of the frontier to change fundamentally the stratified society of the parent region or to make any great contribution to American democracy provides the basis for a new and more realistic interpretation of the influence of the frontier on American life." This study was favorably reviewed by Lester J. Cappon (1900-81), the prominent American history and documentary editor, whose career encompassed serving as a history professor and archivist at the University of Virginia and later as an archivist at the College of William and Mary and for Colonial Williamsburg.  While at William and Mary he was Director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture and editor of The William and Mary Quarterly.  A copy is laid in. This copy belonged to Weymouth T. Jordan (1912-68) and is signed by him on the fep.  Jordan served on the history faculty of Florida State University, 1949-68.  He was a widely recognized scholar of the social and economic life of antebellum Alabama and the author of Antebellum Alabama:  Town and Country !957).  He also served as head of the Civil War Roster Project, 1970-2004, and edited twelve volumes of the Roster Series. Mylar protected dust jacket lightly toned; edge wear; repaired split down front edge of spine; light page toning; good copy of first printing of this scarce and significant volume.