Historiography, American

Historiography, American. Within the vast and fluid domain of collective memory, historical writing serves a special purpose. It refines, stabilizes, and extends the recorded experience of groups, societies, and undertakings. Its practitioners are an intellectual elite, applying their own standards and traditions to the task at hand. Yet they can never escape the authority of the documents available to them or the guidance of the milieu in which they work. Historical writing arises from the interplay of a codifying tradition, an access to sources, and a changing, contemporary culture.

Colonial and Antebellum Eras.

During the first century of European colonization of the North American mainland, New England produced the most memorable historical writing. This was the period of Puritan history, when clergymen and magistrates celebrated the divine guidance that had led them to the New World and preserved their settlements through famine, war, and religious dissension. From William Bradford's simple story of remembered experience (Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 1952) to Cotton Mather's pompous scholarship (Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols., 1702), the Puritan histories interpreted the oddities of everyday life and the great events of the colony with a pervasive sense of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most of America's leading historians still bore the stamp of New England. Some were sons of clergymen ( Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth). Others, in New England colleges, received an education steeped in the moral earnestness that survived a slow transition to a more secular culture. To upper‐class New Englanders, the solid lessons of character and the down‐to‐earth verities that history imparted remained clearly preferable to the fabrications of fiction or the abstractions of political theory.

In the rationalistic atmosphere of the eighteenth century, however, historiography became relatively independent of religious sponsorship. A new basis appeared with the accumulation of wealth and leisure in the hands of cultivated individuals who could devote much of their time to historical research and writing. This was the era of patrician history, when scholars followed the great classical historians in holding up to posterity examples of errors, failings, and laudable deeds.

Nevertheless, patrician historians moved with the times. They responded on the one hand to modern styles of scholarship coming out of Europe and, on the other, to a changing political culture. The foremost of the eighteenth‐century historians, Thomas Hutchinson, combined in his History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts‐Bay (3 vols., 1764–1828) a patrician respect for English political institutions with a judicious, critical management of documentary evidence. After the Revolutionary War, although historians remained the custodians of an English heritage, their field of vision widened. In place of the earlier concentration on individual colonies, the best historians now encompassed an American nation, and their grand theme heralded the opening on the American continent of a new era in the progress of liberty. This was the burden of Parkman's gripping, seven‐volume narrative, France and England in North America (1865–1892) and of Bancroft's History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent (6 vols., 1834–1885). Although a shallower historian than Parkman, Bancroft struck a deeper chord in midcentury opinion by celebrating the American people as the standard‐bearers of democracy.

Gilded Age and Early Twentieth Century.

The romantic exuberance that suffused the pages of Parkman and Bancroft faded among a younger generation who came to the fore in the 1870s and after. For them history was not primarily a branch of literature; it was becoming a science. Historians could discover regularities in the past and, to some extent, project their consequences. But the desire for a richly evocative historical literature endured, and Henry Adams's History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (9 vols., 1889–1891) provided an unforgettable example of art persisting within the forms of scientific inquiry. Nonetheless, practitioners of a science of history gained an unassailable preeminence in the new universities that were springing up on a German model. There, historians created academic departments that trained students to make a career of teaching other students while writing scientific monographs that would reflect credit on their respective universities and draw still more students. Gentlemen like Adams did not fit comfortably into this rule‐bound world of specialization, division of labor, credentialing, and uniformity. The era of professional history, in which we still live, had begun.

Although the early professional historians adopted a more neutral tone, they worked within the national myth that the patricians had constructed: the myth of a new nation uniquely qualified to lead the world in the blessings of liberty and the fruits of progress. At first, scholars argued chiefly over the origins of this distinctive history. Some dwelled on an Anglo‐Saxon heritage of law and institutions. Others, such as Frederick Jackson Turner, turned westward to highlight the leveling influence of the American frontier. In the twentieth century, under the influence of the Progressive movement, an interest in the dynamics of change challenged the more conservative study of continuities. Following the lead of Charles A. Beard, whose Rise of American Civilization (1927) was the most widely read synthesis since Bancroft's, many scholars interpreted American history as a recurring struggle between social‐economic elites and a broad popular party that was widening the distribution of power and wealth. In this revision, the story of a rising nation endured, but the cast of characters expanded significantly.

Post–World War II Developments.

After World War II, the vigor of the American economy, together with a worldwide Cold War conflict between totalitarian and democratic systems, stirred a new generation of historians to reassess the depth of class conflict within the United States. The internal divisions that progressive historians had emphasized now seemed less salient; instead, fresh questions about what has held together an apparently heterogeneous society came to the fore, especially in books by David Potter and Louis Hartz. The consensus historians, as they were first dubbed in 1959, stressed the uniqueness of the American experience. They took national myths seriously as a force in history, analyzed national character, and flocked to cultural history and the history of ideas.

The consensus paradigm crashed abruptly in the late 1960s with nearly all its associated projects. A few historians strove to preserve the breadth of the consensus approach while opening up its content to conflicts and contradictions, but most chose an intensified specialization, which flourished in the absence of any unifying paradigm. The consensus approach simply could not cope with the social discontent that burst forth in the sixties among academics, students, young women, and most especially racial and ethnic minorities. Instead of claiming a place in a larger national history that had never given them adequate recognition, most of the historians of these emergent groups preferred a history of their own tenacious resistance to the “mainstream.” In one sense American history was finally democratized. In another sense, it fragmented into many separate histories of particular groups and small places. The reality of an overall American identity, either as an incentive to progress or as a reassurance of continuity, was less apparent than ever. Shrinking from the teaching of survey courses and facing a constriction of publishing outlets and academic jobs, professional historians by the 1990s had to wonder if a specifically American history was still viable.
See also Cultural Pluralism; Education: The Rise of the University; Fifties, The; Mather, Increase and Cotton; Progressive Era; Puritanism; Sixties, The; Social Science.

Bibliography

George H. Callcott , History in the United States, 1800–1860, 1970.
Alden T. Vaughan , The Evolution of Virginia History: Early Historians of the First Colony, and Harry M. Ward , The Search for American Identity: Early Historians of New England, in Perspectives on Early American History, eds. Alden T. Vaughan and George Athan Billias, 1973, pp. 9–62.
Peter Novick , That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, 1988.
John Higham , History: Professional Scholarship in America, updated ed., 1989.
Michael Kammen , Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, 1991.
John Higham , The Future of American History, Journal of American History 80 (March 1994): 1289–1309.

John Higham