Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) was one of the most important American historians of the twentieth-century. Through his influence in the academy, the study of the so-called "problem-oriented-history" was institutionalized, on the basis that the discipline should provide a greater understanding of the present through the analysis of the past. Defender of the presentist character of History and of a bland relativism, Turner established some of the postulates that would become standards in the universities of the United States, such as the study of the "invisible forces" that shape and determine the historical process and of the great mass of anonymous human beings that helped to build democracy on American soil.
Frederick Jackson Turner; American historiography; presentism