Meanwhile, environmental history has emerged, in large part from the frontier historiography, hence its emphasis on wilderness. It plays an increasingly large role in frontier studies. Historians approached the environment for the frontier or regionalism. The first group emphasizes human agency on the environment; the second looks at the influence of the environment. William Cronon has argued that Turner's famous 1893 essay was environmental history in an embryonic form. It emphasized the vast power of free land to attract and reshape settlers, making a transition from wilderness to civilization.