View Full Version : Forget the Founding Fathers
I just read this review this morning. While several of the books sound interesting, the reviewer's narrative is even more provocative at times. He certainly has me thinking, and I expect it while take a while to fully digest all of his points...
June 5, 2005
Forget the Founding Fathers
By BARRY GEWEN
THE founding fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents. What was their cherished Declaration of Independence but empty political posturing? They groaned about the burden of taxation, but it was the English who were shouldering the real burden, paying taxes on everything from property to beer, from soap to candles, tobacco, paper, leather and beeswax. The notorious tea tax, which had so inflamed the people of Massachusetts, was only one-fourth of what the English paid at home; even Benjamin Franklin labeled the Boston Tea Party an act of piracy. Meanwhile, smugglers, with the full connivance of the colonists, were getting rich at the expense of honest tax-paying citizens. The recent French and Indian War had doubled Britain's national debt, but the Americans, who were the most immediate beneficiaries, were refusing to contribute their fair share.
The revolutionaries complained about a lack of representation in Parliament, but in this they were no different from the majority of Englishmen. What was more, the God-given or nature-given rights they claimed for themselves included the right to hold Africans in bondage. Edward Gibbon, who knew something about the ups and downs of history, opposed the rebels from the House of Commons. Samuel Johnson called them ''a race of convicts'' who ''ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.''
Observed from across the Atlantic, the story of the Revolution looks very different from the one every American child grows up with. To see that story through British eyes, as Stanley Weintraub's ''Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire: 1775-1783'' enables us to do, is to see an all-too-familiar tale reinvigorated. Weintraub reminds us that justice did not necessarily reside with the rebels, that the past can always be viewed from multiple perspectives. And he confronts us with the fact that an American triumph was anything but inevitable. History of course belongs to the victors. If Britain's generals had been more enterprising, if the French had failed to supply vital military and financial assistance, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the rest would be known to us not as political and philosophical giants but as reckless (and hanged) losers, supporting players in a single act of Britain's imperial drama. We would all be Canadians now, with lower prescription drug costs and an inordinate fondness for winter sports.
But Weintraub's book does more than add a fresh dimension to a tired subject. By giving the war a genuinely international flavor, it points the way to a new understanding of American history. Instead of looking out at the rest of the world from an American perspective, it rises above national boundaries to place the past in a global context. This is a significant undertaking. At a time when the role of the United States in the world has never been more dominant, or more vulnerable, it is crucially important for us to see how the United States fits into the jigsaw of international relations. Weintraub indicates how American history may come to be written in the future.
A globalized history of the United States would be only the latest twist in a constantly changing narrative. Broadly speaking, since the end of World War II there have been three major schools of American history; each reflected and served the mood of the country at a particular time. In the 1940's and 50's, that mood was triumphal. As Frances FitzGerald explains in ''America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the 20th Century,'' the United States was routinely presented in those years as ''perfect: the greatest nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom and technological progress.'' The outside world may have been intruding on the slumbering nation through the cold war, the United Nations, NATO and the rise of Communist China, but the textbooks' prevailing narrative remained resolutely provincial. ''The United States had been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world,'' the books taught. ''Throughout history, it had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant and diseased countries. . . . American motives were always altruistic.''
The histories of that time, FitzGerald says, were ''seamless,'' a word that applied not only to schoolbooks but also to the work of the period's most sophisticated scholars and writers, men like Richard Hofstadter and Louis Hartz. Reacting against the challenge of totalitarianism, they went looking for consensus or, in Hofstadter's phrase, ''the central faith'' of America, and they found it in the national commitment to bourgeois individualism and egalitarianism. Americans clustered around a democratic, capitalist middle. Uniquely among major nations, the United States had avoided serious ideological conflict and political extremes; even its radicals and dissenters adhered to what Hofstadter called the ''Whiggish center'' and Hartz termed ''the liberal tradition.'' Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote about ''the vital center.'' Daniel Bell spoke of ''the end of ideology.''
Because they emphasized unity at the expense of division and dissent -- Hartz referred to ''the shadow world'' of American social conflict -- these consensus historians later were criticized for being conservative and complacent. There is some truth to this charge, but only some. As a group, they were reformers, even liberal Democrats, but their liberalism was pragmatic and incremental. Mindful of the leftist extremism of the 1930's, they looked upon idealism as something to be distrusted; grand visions, they had come to understand, could do grand damage. Taken too far, this viewpoint could lead to a defense of the status quo, or at least to a preference for the way things were to the way visionaries said they could be. Down that road, neoconservatism beckoned. Hofstadter, for one, was discomforted by some of his critics, and admitted to having ''serious misgivings of my own about what is known as consensus history.'' It had never been his purpose, he explained, to deny the very real conflicts that existed within the framework he and others were attempting to outline.
(continued)
Hofstadter acknowledged that his writing ''had its sources in the Marxism of the 1930's,'' and an alert reader could detect a residual Marxism, or at least an old-fashioned radicalism, in some of his comments in ''The American Political Tradition.'' Though the book appeared in the late 1940's, at the onset of one of the greatest economic booms in American history, Hofstadter was still complaining about ''bigness and corporate monopoly,'' misguidedly declaring that ''competition and opportunity have gone into decline.'' Similarly, in ''The Liberal Tradition in America,'' Hartz brilliantly but, it seemed, ruefully, analyzed why socialism had failed to take root in the United States.
However much these thinkers had been disappointed by Marxism, they were hardly ready to embrace straightforward majoritarian democracy. Indeed, with the exception of Henry Adams, there has probably never been a historian more suspicious of ''the people'' than Richard Hofstadter. For him vox populi conjured up images of racism, xenophobia, paranoia, anti-intellectualism. The more congenial Hartz described Americans as possessing ''a vast and almost charming innocence of mind''; his hope was that the postwar encounter with the rest of the world would awaken his countrymen from their sheltered, basically oafish naivete.
But if the consensus historians were not Marxists and not majoritarian democrats, what, during the cold war era, could they be? What other choice was there? The answer is that they were ironists who stood beyond political debate, beyond their own narratives. Hartz urged scholars to get ''outside the national experience''; ''instead of recapturing our past, we have got to transcend it,'' he said. One became an anthropologist of one's own society. How better to understand the national character, what made America America? Yet the outsider approach had real limitations, as became apparent once the tranquil 50's turned into the tumultuous 60's. The consensus historian, Hartz wrote, ''finds national weaknesses and he can offer no absolute assurance on the basis of the past that they will be remedied. He tends to criticize and then shrug his shoulders.'' This preference for the descriptive over the prescriptive, with its mix of resignation and skepticism, its simultaneous enjoyment and rejection of the spectacle of American life, was at bottom ''aesthetic.'' In retrospect, one can even begin to see certain links between the consensus generation's aesthetic irony and the distancing attitude Susan Sontag described in her 1964 essay, ''Notes on Camp.''
In any event, the work of these historians was drastically undermined by the upheavals of the 60's and early 70's -- the Kennedy assassination and the other political murders, the Vietnam War, the urban riots, the student revolts, Watergate and the kulturkampf of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. As division and conflict consumed the country, the emphasis on American unity seemed misguided. And the ironic stance itself looked irresponsible. The times demanded not distance but engagement, not anthropologists but activists, not a shrug but a clenched fist. Everyone was being forced to make choices, and those choices presented themselves with an almost melodramatic starkness, especially on the campuses that were the homes of the consensus historians. It was the blacks against the bigots, the doves against the hawks, the Beatles against Rodgers and Hammerstein. For historians, too, the choice was easy: for the neglected minorities and against the dominant dead white males.
As postwar seamlessness faded in the 1960's, a school of multicultural historians emerged to take the place of the consensus historians. This school has been subjected to a lot of criticism of late, but in fact it brought forth a golden age of social history. Blacks, American Indians, immigrants, women and gays had been ignored in the national narrative, or, more precisely, treated as passive objects rather than active subjects. The Civil War may have been fought over slavery, but the slaves were rarely heard from. Who knew anything about the Indians at Custer's Last Stand? The immigrants' story was told not through their own cultures but through their assimilation into the mainstream. But now, the neglected and powerless were gaining their authentic voices.
New studies increased our knowledge, enlarging and transforming the picture of America, even when the multiculturalists worked in very restricted areas. Judith A. Carney's ''Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas,'' for example, describes how the South Carolina rice industry was built not only on slave labor but on the agricultural and technological knowledge brought over by the Africans. The book has not found many readers outside the academy, but it nonetheless changes our understanding of the black contribution to American life.
At its best, multiculturalism illuminated the niches and byways of American history. It investigated smaller and smaller subjects in greater and greater detail: gays in the military during World War II, black laundresses in the postbellum South. But this specialization created a problem of its own. In 1994, when the Journal of American History asked historians about the state of their profession, they bemoaned its ''narrowness,'' its ''divorce from the public.'' The editor of the journal wrote that ''dazzling people with the unfamiliar and erudite'' had become ''more highly prized than telling a good story or distilling wisdom.''
Yet what story, exactly, did the multiculturalists want to tell? Could all those detailed local and ethnic studies be synthesized into a grand narrative? Unfortunately, the answer was yes. There was a unifying vision, but it was simplistic. Since the victims and losers were good, it followed that the winners were bad. From the point of view of downtrodden blacks, America was racist; from the point of view of oppressed workers, it was exploitative; from the point of view of conquered Hispanics and Indians, it was imperialistic. There was much to condemn in American history, little or nothing to praise. Perhaps it was inevitable that multiculturalism curdled into political correctness.
Exhibit A, Howard Zinn's ''People's History of the United States,'' has sold more than a million copies. From the start, Zinn declared that his perspective was that of the underdog. In ''a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people . . . not to be on the side of the executioners.'' Whereas the Europeans who arrived in the New World were genocidal predators, the Indians who were already there believed in sharing and hospitality (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed among them), and raped Africa was a continent overflowing with kindness and communalism (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed there). American history was a story of cruel domination by the wealthy and privileged. The founding fathers ''created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times,'' Zinn stated. The Civil War was a conflict of elites, and World War II was fought not to stop fascism but to extend America's empire. The United States and the Soviet Union both sought to control their oppressed populations, ''each country with its own techniques.'' The Vietnam War was a clash between organized modern technology and organized human beings, ''and the human beings won.'' We have traveled a long way from the sophisticated ironies of the consensus historians.
A reaction against distortions and exaggerations of this kind was sure to come. Battered by political correctness, basking in Reaganesque optimism and victory in the cold war, the country in the 1980's and 90's was ready for a reaffirmation of its fundamental values. After all, democracy was spreading around the world and history itself (treated as a conflict of ideologies) was declared at an end. One of the first historians to take heart from the cold war's conclusion and to see the value of re-examining the formative years of the republic was the early-American scholar Joseph J. Ellis. In ''Founding Brothers'' he wrote: ''all alternative forms of political organization appear to be fighting a futile rearguard action against the liberal institutions and ideas first established in the United States.''
Ellis was a major figure in the new school of founding fathers historians that emerged in the 1990's. But as an academic, he was exceptional. Most were amateur and freelance historians, since the universities had become hostile to the kind of ''great man'' history they were interested in doing. A National Review editor, Richard Brookhiser, taking Plutarch as his model, explained that his goal was to write ''moral biography,'' a phrase unlikely to endear him to postmodernist academics; in rapid succession he produced brief, deft studies of Washington, Hamilton and the Adams family. Ellis, the biographer of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, saw himself engaged in retro battle against his own profession, and observed that his work was ''a polite argument against the scholarly grain, based on a set of presumptions that are so disarmingly old-fashioned that they might begin to seem novel in the current climate.'' George Washington, Ellis joked, was ''the deadest, whitest male in American history.''
But if the academy was hostile to these books, the larger world was not. The volumes by Brookhiser and Ellis, not to mention works by David McCullough, Ron Chernow and Walter Isaacson, were widely praised. Some won National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes. And in sharp contrast to the restricted monographs of the multiculturalists, they sold by the truckload. Here was genuinely popular history, written with a public purpose and designed to capture a large audience. Ellis's ''Founding Brothers'' was a best seller in hardback for almost a year, and a best seller in paperback for more than a year. Isaacson's ''Benjamin Franklin'' spent 26 weeks on the best-seller list; McCullough's ''John Adams'' entered the list at No.1, staying there for 13 weeks, rivaling for a while the popularity of novels by the likes of John Grisham and Danielle Steel. Chernow's ''Alexander Hamilton'' and Ellis's ''His Excellency: George Washington'' both made the best-seller list last year.
And yet there are reasons to believe the popularity of the school is peaking. For one thing, it is running out of founding fathers. The only major figure still awaiting his Chernow or McCullough is the thoughtful but unexciting James Madison. No doubt the principal author of the Constitution will have his day, but the founding fathers school is facing the choice of reaching down into the second ranks, or going over ground already covered by others. Brookhiser's most recent biography was of the less-than-great Gouverneur Morris, whom he teasingly describes as ''the rake who wrote the Constitution.'' Meanwhile, another formidable biography of Adams has just come out, and Benjamin Franklin has been turned into an industry unto himself, the subject of an apparently endless flood of books. There's always room for different interpretations, but the bigger picture is in the process of being lost. A school that arose in reaction to the excesses of the multiculturalists has started feeding on itself.
Most important, however, 9/11 has changed the way Americans relate to their past. The war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the apparently insoluble problem of nuclear proliferation and the ominous but real potential for a ''clash of civilizations'' -- all these are compelling us to view history in a new way, to shed the America-centered perspective of the founding fathers school and look at the American past as a single stream in a larger global current. Stanley Weintraub will never equal the best of the founding fathers authors in the felicity of his prose, and ''Iron Tears'' is unlikely to reach far beyond the campuses. But by embedding the American Revolution in British history, by internationalizing it, his book speaks more directly to the needs of our time than do biographies of Adams and Hamilton.
Weintraub is hardly alone. Another book that gains immediacy by giving a global spin to an old subject is Alonzo L. Hamby's ''For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s.'' The New Deal is as overdiscussed as the Revolution, yet by internationalizing it, Hamby is able to raise provocative, revealing questions, even disturbing ones. The Great Depression, he points out, was a crisis that ''begged for international solutions.'' The Western governments, however, pursued beggar-thy-neighbor policies, including protective tariffs and competitive currency devaluations, that ''frequently made things worse.'' And the United States, he says, was the worst offender of all, ''the most isolationist of the major world powers.'' Roosevelt was an economic nationalist who mistakenly treated his country as a self-contained unit, even actively sabotaging the feeble efforts at international cooperation. Whatever economic successes he had domestically -- and Hamby, following other recent historians, shows that those successes were modest indeed -- his actions contributed to the nation-against-nation, Hobbesian atmosphere of the world arena. Hamby does not go so far as to blame Roosevelt for Hitler's growing strength in the mid-1930's, but it would not be difficult to take his argument in that direction. Roosevelt was an ''impressive'' figure, Hamby writes. But from a global perspective, the New Deal record was ''hardly impressive.''
AS if to signal to historians the kind of reassessment that needs to be done, the National Endowment for the Humanities will sponsor a four-week institute at the Library of Congress later this month on ''Rethinking America in Global Perspective.'' And one group of professional historians has already begun submerging the United States within a broader identity. The growing field of ''Atlantic history,'' connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas through economics, demography and politics, has become a recognized academic specialty, taught not only in the United States but also in Britain and Germany. It is generating books, conferences, prizes and, of course, a Web site. No less a figure than the eminent Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn has devoted his most recent book to this ''very large subject'' that is ''now coming into focus.'' Bailyn writes that Atlantic history is ''peculiarly relevant for understanding the present.''
It may be that for general readers trying to understand the present (as opposed to scholars), Atlantic history goes too far in dissolving the United States into a blurry, ill-defined transoceanic entity -- the might and power of the nation are not about to disappear, nor is the threat posed by its enemies. But because the post-9/11 globalization of American history is really just now taking shape, there is sufficient flexibility at the moment to accommodate a wide range of approaches. Three recent books, for example, offer starkly contrasting visions of America's past and, correspondingly, of its present world role. They are of varying quality but in their different approaches, they point to the kind of intellectual debates we can expect in the future from historians who speak to our current condition.
In ''A Patriot's History of the United States,'' Larry Schweikart, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, and Michael Allen, a professor of history at the University of Washington, Tacoma, self-consciously return to 50's triumphalism, though with a very different purpose from that of the consensus historians. Not interested in irony or in standing outside of history, they are full-blooded participants, self-assured and robust moralists, who argue that the United States is a uniquely virtuous country, with a global mission to spread American values around the world. ''An honest evaluation of the history of the United States,'' they declare, ''must begin and end with the recognition that, compared to any other nation, America's past is a bright and shining light. America was, and is, the city on the hill, the fountain of hope, the beacon of liberty.'' Theirs is a frankly nationalistic -- often blatantly partisan -- text in which the United States is presented as having a duty to lead while other countries, apparently, have an obligation to follow. ''In the end,'' they write, ''the rest of the world will probably both grimly acknowledge and grudgingly admit that, to paraphrase the song, God has 'shed His grace on thee.' '' This is a point of view with few adherents in the academy these days (let alone in other nations), but it's surely one that enjoys warm support among many red-state conservatives, and in the halls of the White House.
Critics of the Bush administration will find more to agree with in the perspective of '' 'A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide,'' Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 20th-century mass murder. Unlike Schweikart and Allen, she does not see virtue inhering, almost divinely, in American history. Instead, she judges that history against a larger moral backdrop, asking how the country has responded to the most dire of international crimes, genocide. The record is hardly inspiring. Power reveals that throughout the 20th century, whenever genocide occurred, whether the victims were Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Kurds or Tutsis, the American government stood by and did nothing. Worse, in some instances, it sided with the murderers. '' 'A Problem from Hell' '' exhorts Americans to learn from their history of failure and dereliction, and to live up to their professed values; we have ''a duty to act.'' Whereas Schweikart and Allen believe American history shows that the United States is already an idealistic agent in world affairs, Power contends that our history shows it is not -- but that it should become one.
A third book, Margaret MacMillan's ''Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World,'' is in effect an answer to Schweikart, Allen and Power -- an object lesson in the ways American idealism can go wrong. MacMillan's focus is on Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I. A visionary, an evangelist, an inspiration, an earth-shaker, a holy fool, Wilson went to Paris in 1919 with grand ambitions: to hammer out a peace settlement and confront a wretched world with virtue, to reconfigure international relations and reform mankind itself. Freedom and democracy were ''American principles,'' he proclaimed. ''And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and they must prevail.'' Other leaders were less sure. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, liked Wilson's sincerity and straightforwardness, but also found him obstinate and vain. France's prime minister, the acerbic and unsentimental Georges Clemenceau, said that talking to him was ''something like talking to Jesus Christ.'' (He didn't mean that as a compliment.)
As a committed American democrat, Wilson affirmed his belief in the principle of self-determination for all peoples, but in Paris his convictions collided with reality. Eastern Europe was ''an ethnic jumble,'' the Middle East a ''myriad of tribes,'' with peoples and animosities so intermingled they could never be untangled into coherent polities. In the Balkans, leaders were all for self-determination, except when it applied to others. The conflicting parties couldn't even agree on basic facts, making neutral mediation impossible. Ultimately, the unbending Wilson compromised -- on Germany, China, Africa and the South Pacific. He yielded to the force majeure of Turks and Italians. In the end, he left behind him a volcano of dashed expectations and festering resentments. MacMillan's book is a detailed and painful record of his failure, and of how we continue to live with his troublesome legacy in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Yet the idealists -- nationalists and internationalists alike -- do not lack for responses. Wilsonianism, they might point out, has not been discredited. It always arises from its own ashes; it has even become the guiding philosophy of the present administration. Give George W. Bush key passages from Wilson's speeches to read, and few would recognize that almost a century had passed. Nor should this surprise us. For while the skeptics can provide realism, they can't provide hope. As MacMillan says, the Treaty of Versailles, particularly the League of Nations, was ''a bet placed on the future.'' Who, looking back over the rubble, would have wanted to bet on the past?
Little has changed in our new century. Without the dreams of the idealists, all that is on offer is more of the same -- more hatred, more bloodshed, more war, and eventually, now, nuclear war. Anti-Wilsonian skeptics tend to be pessimistic about the wisdom of embarking on moral crusades but, paradoxically, it is the idealists, the hopeful ones, who, in fact, should be painting in Stygian black. They are the ones who should be reminding us that for most of the world, history is not the benign story of inexorable progress Americans like to believe in. Rather, it's a record of unjustified suffering, irreparable loss, tragedy without catharsis. It's a gorgon: stare at it too long and it turns you to stone.
Fifty years ago, Louis Hartz expressed the hope that the cold war would bring an end to American provincialism, that international responsibility would lead to ''a new level of consciousness.'' It hasn't happened. In the 1950's, two wide oceans and a nuclear stockpile allowed Americans to continue living blithely in their imagined city on a hill, and the student revolts of the 60's and 70's, if anything, fed the notion that the rest of the world was ''out there.'' ''Bring the troops home'' was the protesters' idea of a foreign policy.
But the disaster of 9/11 proved that the oceans do not protect us and that our nuclear arsenal, no matter how imposing, will not save our cities from terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. Today, there is no retreating into the provincialism and innocence of the past. And because withdrawal is not an option, the work of the globalizing American historians possesses an urgency unknown to scholars of previous generations. The major lesson the new historians must teach is that there is no longer any safe haven from history's horror story. Looking forward is unnerving, but looking backward is worse. The United States has no choice. Like it or not, it is obliged to take a leading role in an international arena that is unpredictable and dangerous, hopeful perhaps, but also potentially catastrophic.
Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.
FWIW, Mr. Gewen's take on the historiography of the War of American Revolution and international history are a bit behind the times. His discussion of the "Consensus School" also merits clarification.
He tells us:
But Weintraub's book does more than add a fresh dimension to a tired subject. By giving the war a genuinely international flavor, it points the way to a new understanding of American history. Instead of looking out at the rest of the world from an American perspective, it rises above national boundaries to place the past in a global context.
However, Samuel Flagg Bemis addressed the international dimensions of that conflict in his The Diplomacy Of The American Revolution (1935) as did Jonathan Dull several decades later in A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (1987). As for the military and naval operations of that conflict, Piers Mackesy's The War for America 1775-1783 (1964) addressed the war in a global context. While Mackesy's work was difficult to find on this side of the Atlantic for many years it, was republished by the University of Nebraska Press's Bison Books in 1993.
The focus on the Atlantic world and America's place in it is nothing new. One may recall discussions of the 'slave triangle' in the American history classes you took in high school--slaves from Africa to the Americas, raw materials from America to Europe, manufactured goods from Europe to Africa. And as the saying goes, a high school history text book is twenty to thirty years behind the cutting edge of knowledge.
Instead, the renewed focus on the Atlantic world is better viewed as a return to a traditional approach to history focusing on European empires--centering around Great Britain and her rivals (the Imperial School)--with a collection of new sensibilities and improved analytical tools. In the past, the contest of European empires had been treated as the spread of Western civilization to the Americas from a top down / from the center to the periphery perspective. Now, historians of all stripes are more prone to discuss the interaction in a variety of directions. While Bernard Bailyn rightly deserves credit for rebooting how Americanists study the Early Republic, he is hardly in the vanguard of the "new" approach to Atlantic history. R. R. Palmer's two volume The Age of Democratic Revolution (1959, 1964) got the ball rolling on placing America in the Atlantic world. Then there's also James A. Field, Jr. America and the Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 (1963).*
Finally, Mr. Gewen's placement of Hofstadter and of Hartz within the trajectory of post-World War II consensus historiography reflects a broadly held misconception (perhaps propagated by Wikipedia). While both men agreed with those Americanists who argued that consensus was an enduring theme in American history, they did not think it was a good thing. (I am increasingly convinced that the intellectual life, if not also the political landscape, in America would look drastically different [read: better] had Hofstadter not died in 1970. Or if Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. had not been so hopelessly mediocre.)
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* For a further discussion of the integration of American historical works within the framework of the Atlantic world, please see Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds. American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review. Contributions in American History, no. 90. Jon L. Wakelyn, ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), especially chapters 1-3: Jonathan R. Dull, “American Foreign Relations Before the Constitution”; Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, “The Early National Period, 1789-1815”; and Lester D. Langley, “American Foreign Policy in an Age of Nationalism.” Dull’s essay suggests scholarship may still be wed to Imperial School thinking and that may influence later periods. Hatzenberg and Langley show scholarship on Early National Period locked to European issues. (Again, Google Desktop Search.:lifter)
As postwar seamlessness faded in the 1960's, a school of multicultural historians emerged to take the place of the consensus historians. This school has been subjected to a lot of criticism of late, but in fact it brought forth a golden age of social history. Blacks, American Indians, immigrants, women and gays had been ignored in the national narrative, or, more precisely, treated as passive objects rather than active subjects. The Civil War may have been fought over slavery, but the slaves were rarely heard from. Who knew anything about the Indians at Custer's Last Stand? The immigrants' story was told not through their own cultures but through their assimilation into the mainstream. But now, the neglected and powerless were gaining their authentic voices.
Actually, those voices could be found from much earlier - but out-of-the-mainstream - narratives, biographies, and autobiographies, as well as among the depression era works (personal interviews, historical narratives, anthropological and sociological studies) of writers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists done under the funding of the Works Progress Administration. They're still around and can be found among the stacks of the NARA and specialized library holdings. For example, the collection at UC Irvine is comprised of reports from the WPA historical and anthropological projects completed in Orange County, California, from 1935 to 1939. The reports reveal factual information on local history and anthropological research on Native Americans, are the original or first carbon typescripts, and are illustrated with original photographs and sketches. Some interesting reading - but seldom mentioned among the pop historiography of mainstream readers and the educational system. ;)
Gutes lesen,
Richard's $.02 :munchin