HISTORY

The Oxford English Dictionary describes "history" as "a narrative of past events, [an] account, tale, story." Ever since its founding in 1789, the American republic has placed great emphasis on sharing its story with the world. Although historians have never agreed on a single approach to the study of the past, the years from 1870 to 1920 nevertheless witnessed a revolution in how the majority of historians conveyed their message to the American people.

At the onset of the Gilded Age, wealthy New England gentlemen forged multivolume "grand narratives" that had great appeal to the reading public. "Popular history" lecturers reached equally wide audiences. By the end of the Great War, however, historians had begun to professionalize. An increasing number held advanced degrees and were somehow linked to American colleges and universities. Simultaneously, historians tried to ground their discipline on science, basing their accounts on indisputable, archival facts. Consciously borrowing from the emerging social sciences, advocates of the New History produced scores of specialized monographs in the hope of improving national life. Yet the tradition of the all-encompassing grand narrative did not die. Rather, it slipped from the hands of professional historians to playwrights, historical novelists, and, especially, filmmakers. Thus, the approach and content of "history," as well as the goals of historians, shifted considerably from the 1870s to 1920s.

LITERARY HISTORIANS

By the time of the Philadelphia Centennial celebration of 1876, history ranked as a respected mode of thought, but it barely existed as a separate discipline. Although about seventy local historical societies had cropped up across the land, as late as 1880 there were only eleven full-time history teachers on a university level. The German seminar system of training scholars had just been introduced to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which produced its first history doctorate in 1882. When people spoke of "history" they usually referred to ancient Greece or Rome, the Renaissance, or the Middle Ages, rather than the relatively brief time period of the American Republic.

The four dominant American history writers of the day—George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, John Motley, and Francis Parkman—have been termed "Romantic men of letters." All had forged literary reputations before they began to write history, and all were New England gentlemen of independent wealth who considered writing history their "duty" rather than a way to earn a living. Each produced multivolume accounts that seized on overarching narrative themes, usually involving "progress." In their eyes, "history" was a story filled with intense drama. Moreover, they wrote not merely to entertain, even fascinate, their readers; rather, they wrote to convey moral instruction about the nature of politics, war, and human behavior. Like literature, history remained an essential component of an educated person's moral discourse about the world.

For William H. Prescott (1796–1859) and John Motley (1814–1877), the drama of history lay with Europe and Latin America. After graduating from Harvard, Prescott became fascinated with the clash of Spanish and Native American worlds, as shown in History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), and his three-volume History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain (1855–1858). The famed Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott served as Prescott's model and he is viewed primarily as a literary artist rather than a research scholar. For Motley, the drama hinged on the saga of Holland, and he spent a decade researching his three-volume The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856). Since American publishers remained leery about potential sales of such an arcane subject, he paid for the publication himself. Surprisingly, the set sold fifteen thousand copies in two years and established his reputation, especially abroad, as a literary master.

The historians George Bancroft (1800–1891) and Francis Parkman (1823–1893) remain far better known, both in their day as well as ours. Bancroft's ninety-one-year life spanned virtually the entire nineteenth century. His Harvard education and his fortunate marriage to the wealthy Sarah Dwight enabled him to pursue a career as a Democratic party politician and a scholar. Beginning in 1834 he published the first of what would become the ten-volume History of the United States. Bancroft argued that as the American people utilized their republican political system, they reflected the authentic voice of God. One scholar has termed Bancroft's books a "multi-volume sermon."

No armchair historian, Bancroft became deeply involved with contemporary affairs. He gave a memorial address to Congress on Abraham Lincoln, wrote speeches for Andrew Johnson, and in 1867 was selected as America's minister to Germany. While serving there, he met the famed German historian Leopold von Ranke of the University of Berlin, who praised his books as the best ever written from the democratic point of view. Although intended as a compliment, the remark stung. Rather than "the democratic point of view," Bancroft felt that he had deciphered the key to understanding the totality of the American past.

Although the last volume of Bancroft's History appeared in 1875, publishers repackaged the set in various formats throughout the century. The public eagerly responded, and George Bancroft is rightly designated the father of American historical writing.

Francis Parkman is the only one of the four literary historians still read. Another New England gentleman, from his Harvard days forward he was known to have had "Indians on the brain." He vowed to write a full account of the French conquest of North America. But before he did, he took a daring trip, from March to October 1846, to Wyoming territory. His account of this venture, The California and Oregon Trail (1849), remains his best-known book.

Fortunate that an inheritance relieved him of earning a living, Parkman battled illness all his life: severe eye problems, fierce headaches (probably migraines), insomnia and, eventually, confinement to a wheelchair. During one period he became so incapacitated that he could write only with his eyes closed, producing about six lines a day. He hired people to read to him as well. Given these multiple handicaps, his accomplishments were truly remarkable. He visited Canada at least eight times to walk over the scenes he would later describe. A lapsed Unitarian, he spent time in European monasteries to better increase his understanding of Roman Catholicism, but most of all, he became fascinated by the wilderness of North America.

Francis Parkman began his life's work with Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), followed by The Jesuits in North America (1867) and The Discovery of the Great West (1869). His two-volume Montcalm and Wolfe appeared in 1884 and he completed the series with another two-volume study, A Half Century of Conflict (1892), the title of which may have also referred to his own physical ailments.

Although his work was based on original research, Parkman blended history with literature. He wrote with a verve that few could duplicate, focusing on climax moments like a dramatist and painting historical characters like a novelist. His account of the deaths of the generals James Wolfe and the marquis de Montcalm at the battle of Quebec in 1759 equaled anything that Hollywood would later produce. Although often criticized for his pro-English, pro-Protestant biases, as well as for ignoring hard economic and demographic data, Parkman had few equals. He also had no successors, although some think that the famed twentieth-century historian Samuel Eliot Morison consciously modeled his own books on Parkman's literary masterpieces.

THE POPULARIZERS

The multivolume studies produced by the Romantic men of letters were not the only way by which late-nineteenth-century Americans learned about the past. This era also served as the heyday of the popular lecturer, and two larger-than-life lecturers, John Lord and John Fiske, introduced history to thousands of hearers.

John Lord is completely forgotten but during his lifetime (1810–1894) he delivered perhaps six thousand lectures on history to a wide variety of northern audiences. In 1883 Harvard president Charles Eliot Norton credited him with doing more than any other person to awaken public interest in the field. In a sense, Lord "invented" the one-hour history lecture and placed it firmly in the historian's bag of tricks.

Born into a well-connected but modest merchant family in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Lord graduated from Dartmouth College and Andover Theological Seminary. After service as a lecturer for the American Peace Society, plus suffering the embarrassing withdrawal of a proffered appointment at Harvard, Lord devised an extensive history lecture series that he took to various locales. Terming his twenty-five history lectures a "university extension course," he began presenting them to both college audiences and the paying public by the 1870s. These classes became especially popular with upper-middle-class women, and Lord later confessed that he had to learn to speak over the steady clack of knitting needles.

Largely avoiding politics and warfare, Lord's lectures consisted of biographical sketches of such figures as Socrates, Homer, Abraham, St. Augustine, Mohammed (Muhammad), Queen Elizabeth I, and Napoleon, among others. His presentations included a good bit on art and architecture, presumably with slides. Since his audiences were largely women, he included talks on Joan of Arc, Hannah More, and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), among others. On the subject of American history, he profiled George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and "the American idea." Never a researcher, he confessed that he hoped to "present what is true rather than what is new." Eventually he packaged these capsule biographies into an eight-volume set, Beacon Lights of History. First published in 1884, the set was reprinted in 1888 and in an English edition in 1921. It sold in the millions.

Lord's approach to history was highly moralistic. He praised or condemned figures of the past according to how they measured up to his sense of virtue. Thus, Queen Elizabeth's shifty diplomatic maneuvers were reluctantly praised because he deemed the fight against Spain a worthy one; George Eliot was condemned because she was a "pagan"; and Catherine the Great was so horrible she was never even mentioned. Without the framework provided by liberal Christianity, Lord confessed, his lectures would have no meaning. During his time, however, John Lord reigned as one of the two greatest American popularizers of history.

The second popularizer, John Fiske (1842–1901), is usually remembered as a proponent of the theory of evolution rather than of history, although at the time he wore both hats with equal aplomb. Born into a middle-class New England family, Fiske was a child prodigy. At age eight he had read over two hundred books; by the time he turned twenty he could read eight languages fluently and ten others—including Sanskrit and Wallachian—partially. He graduated from Harvard and passed the Massachusetts bar, but his vigorous advocacy of the ideas of Herbert Spencer made him religiously suspect. Like Lord, he was never offered the hoped-for teaching position at his alma mater. In 1872 Harvard president Charles W. Eliot hired him as an assistant librarian, where he stayed for seven years, after which he began a career as an independent writer and lecturer. Since he enjoyed the good life and had six children to support, Fiske spent a good deal of time on the road, traveling from Maine to Oregon, from St. Louis to Richmond. Many of his lectures were later reworked into magazine articles and books.

Fiske is usually recalled today for his two-volume defense of Herbert Spencer's evolutionary views, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874), but after its publication he increasingly turned to American history, which he viewed through the same evolutionary lens. He penned over fifteen historical works that touched on a variety of national themes. The Discovery of America (two volumes, 1892) dealt with ancient America and included much on Spanish exploration. This was followed by Old Virginia and Her Neighbours (two volumes, 1897), The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America (two volumes, 1899), and The Mississippi Valley in the Civil War (1900). As the scholar Lorenzo J. Greene noted in his diary, Fiske "popularized American history by making it read like a novel" (Working with Carter G. Woodson, p. 259).

Fiske's Critical Period of American History 1783–1789 (1888) is still discussed. As the title suggests, Fiske argued that the era during which the Articles of the Confederation were drafted formed a turning point in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The crucial issue was to determine whether the newly formed nation would consist of one large federal republic or fifty small warring states, as had been the model in ancient Greece and medieval Europe. In Fiske's eyes, the establishment of the Constitution showed the working out of "progress" in representative government.

These historical studies were surely sufficient to earn him his coveted position at Harvard, but by the 1880s university critics began to fault him for his lack of serious archival research. In truth, Fiske was always a better presenter than a discoverer of new material. But nothing seemed to dampen his popularity. In the preface to The Discovery of America, he warned readers that he had received so many unsolicited letters on his books that he could no longer read them, let alone respond. As eloquent on the lecture platform as he was in print, Fiske merged science, religion, progress, and American history. A 1920 reviewer in the Nation observed that philosophers thought of Fiske at his best as a historian, while historians viewed him primarily as a philosopher. His mingling of these themes, however, helped keep him in the public eye for over a generation.

WOMEN AND MINORITIES

The chief focus of late-nineteenth-century history revolved around the political and military activities of the nation or individual states. The few mentions of women or ethnic minorities were largely subsumed under these narratives. But there were a few women or minority historians. The Kentucky geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932) reinterpreted the U.S. past in her American History and Its Geographic Conditions (1903). The lone voice on Indian issues came from Annie Heloise Abel (1873–1947). During her career at Goucher and Smith, she published twelve books on Native America, including a three-volume study, The Slaveholding Indians (1915–1925). The most able members of this category, however, were Alice Morse Earle, George Washington Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Carter G. Woodson.

Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and from her childhood became fascinated with the New England past. Her approach, however, proved far removed from that of her contemporaries. From the publication of her first book The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891) she described the social customs, daily life, and material culture of her region, concentrating, as she put it, on "the everyday life of the times." Although this approach is sometimes dismissed as antiquarianism or "pots and pans" history, her seventeen books and over thirty essays raised it virtually to the level of high art. In addition to widespread sales, Earle became recognized as an expert on early American antiques, and people contacted her from miles around.

Although not professionally trained, Earle did much research in primary documents, even traveling to England to examine materials. Her books were also among the first to address the women's sphere of life: weaving and spinning, meal preparation, attending church, what girls wore, how they managed the household. She also was the first researcher to explore the history of childhood and the family in New England. Because of their pioneering nature, many of her works have been reprinted. Representative titles include Colonial Dames and Good Wives (1895); Child Life in Colonial Days (1899); and Home Life in Colonial Days (1898). Her approach to the past would later be termed "social history."

Although the generation that lived through the American Civil War was well aware of the powerful role that race played in national life, the opportunities for African Americans to write their own past remained few. The most prominent black historians were George Washington Williams (1849–1891), and, a generation later, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950).

Born in Pennsylvania, Williams ran away from home to join the Union Army, where he saw combat. After additional army service, he enrolled at the Newton Theological Institution and began a career as Baptist pastor, newspaper columnist, editor, and lawyer. Moving to Cincinnati, he became the first African American elected to the Ohio legislature, and later, thanks to funding by the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, he toured the Belgian Congo and wrote a scathing public report about the treatment of the natives there.

A long-term collector of African American materials, in 1882 Williams published his thousand-page, two-volume History of the Negro Race from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens. Seven years later, in 1888, he followed with A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865. These were the first books to assess the African American role in U.S. history.

Du Bois became one of the most recognized black scholars of his day. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois became the first black to earn a doctorate from Harvard (1895). His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, became the initial volume in the Harvard Historical Studies series in 1896. He later wrote a brief overview, The Negro (1915), but began to edge into sociology in 1899 with his study titled The Philadelphia Negro. His last venture into history was Black Reconstruction (1935). As editor of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, Du Bois moved gradually into pan-Africanism and, later, an angry Marxism, eventually dying an expatriate. Although a pioneer in African American scholarship, he did not play much of a role in its development during the early twentieth century. That task fell to Carter G. Woodson.

Born in Virginia, Woodson was the second black to receive a doctorate in the field of history. Author of The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, which appeared in 1915, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History that same year and established the Journal of Negro History in 1916. In 1922 he published The Negro in Our History, which remained the standard overview until the appearance of John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom (1947, with frequent updatings). In 1928 Woodson began Negro History week—which later became Black History month. He chose February so as to commingle the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. As the historian Arvarh Strickland has noted, Woodson holds "the undisputed title of the father of Afro-American history" (Greene, p. xxiv).

THE REGIONALISTS

Without question, New England historians dominated the writing of the American past during the late nineteenth century. But that region's "cultural imperialism" did not extend much beyond the 1890s. New voices soon arose to argue that other sections of the nation—the Far West, the Midwest, and the South—were worthy of study as well.

The historian who first insisted that the Spanish Borderlands be included in the national saga was the Ohio-born businessman Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918). After moving to San Francisco to open a bookstore, Bancroft prospered to such an extent that he retired at age thirty-seven to devote himself to collecting documents and writing the story of early California. Over the years he amassed sixty thousand volumes (plus hundreds of documents), which he eventually sold to the University of California, Berkeley.

Drawing on his background as a businessman, Bancroft anticipated both the industrialist Henry Ford and the modern historian Stephen Ambrose by developing an assembly-line technique for writing history. He hired assistants—as many as fifty at a time and perhaps six hundred overall—to research and write an enormous set of books on the history of the American Southwest that would eventually reach thirty-nine volumes. The titles ranged widely. Some examples include: History of Arizona and New Mexico (1889); History of California (seven volumes, 1884–1890); History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming (1890), and so on. Bancroft also did yeoman work in compiling documents relating to old California and he is justly regarded as the founder of Borderlands scholarship.

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934) tried to do for the South what Bancroft had done for the Southwest. Born in Georgia and trained at the state university, he earned his doctorate at Columbia in 1902 with a dissertation titled "Georgia and State Rights." Later he moved to Michigan and Yale where he concentrated on the story of the Old South up to the Civil War. As few historians had explored southern history, Phillips first had to collect the appropriate documents and forge an accurate timeline. He is most famous, or infamous, for his American Negro Slavery (1918) and his Life and Labor in the Old South (1929). Borrowing from the ideas of economists, Phillips was the first historian to suggest that slavery was, indeed, unprofitable and that the system hurt the overall southern economy. Although he made no attempt to hide his views that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, he emphasized that each group became dependent upon the other and that, although unequals, they developed a strange rapport between them. In 1928 he called attention to the "central theme of Southern history": the political effort to retain white supremacy. Acknowledged as the founder of southern history, Phillips's historical views could be seen in the historical fiction of Thomas Dixon and other white supremacist writers. W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson ranked among his most severe critics.

The most famous regionalist was Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), on whom more words have been written than any other American historian. Born in Portage, Wisconsin, Turner earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins under Herbert Baxter Adams. Rejecting the then-prevalent idea that the seeds of democracy came from Europe, Turner argued in his famous 1893 speech at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago that the continually expanding frontier—where "savagery" and "civilization" constantly intermingled—created American democracy. The official passing of the frontier, as seen in the 1890 federal census, did not bode well for the American nation.

Although Turner's ideas have been applied to South Africa, Russia, and the Far Western frontiers, his main focus rested with the antebellum world, especially the Midwest, as the cradle of the democratic ethos. But he popularized two other widely accepted concepts as well: first, that each age rewrites the past from the perspective of the crucial issues of the day; and second, that climate, ethnicity, and geography combine to produce different world views and different political responses (now termed "regionalism"). Although criticized for a number of failings—he never produced his "big book"; he ignored women, minorities, and organized religion; and he viewed Indians as "obstacles" to progress—Turner nevertheless ranks with Henry Adams as one of the few historians of his era whose ideas still resonate.

HENRY ADAMS

There is no doubt that Henry Adams (1838–1918) stands at the center of the turn-of-the-century historical world. Born into one of New England's most distinguished families, Adams attended Harvard, served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, during his term as American minister in Britain in the Civil War, and returned to find himself alienated from contemporary American society.

Although he had no specific training, Harvard invited him to teach medieval history, but he soon tired of that and moved to H Street in Washington, across from the White House, where he became an ironic, independent observer of American life. A genuine polymath, he escaped from the sordid politics of Gilded Age Washington to write a nine-volume The History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–1891). These books emphasized the irrational nature of democracy and despaired at the Founding Fathers' inability to match their noble republican dreams with the sordid reality that eventually emerged. His classic description of American life in 1800, in volume one, has never been surpassed. His friend John Hay completed a ten-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A History (1890), around the same time, and Adams remarked that "between them they had written nearly all the American history there was to write."

Elected president of the American Historical Association, Adams also wrote two essays on the philosophy of history, "The Rule of Phase Applied to History" (1909) and "A Letter to American Teachers of History" (1910), in which he suggested that future historians should draw their analytical frameworks from the sciences, especially physics. To go from George Washington to U. S. Grant, he suggested, reflected not "progress" but a dissipation of energy. It is not clear how serious he was in these suggestions.

Adams's reputation revolves less around his nine-volume History than his two-book attempt to reconcile the human need for order with the chaos he witnessed all around him. His classic Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed in 1904) looked back to the twelfth century, where, as he saw it, the force of Love, as represented by the Virgin Mary, united humankind. He explored the later world of chaos in his The Education of Henry Adams (1918; first privately printed in 1906), where the Dynamo, which he first saw at the Paris Exposition of 1900, represented the same force but without purpose or morality.

The Education was not really an autobiography. Adams skips over much of his life—including the 1885 suicide of his beloved wife, Marian—and hearing a privileged genius constantly whine about "failure" annoys many readers. But the book merged the fields of history, literature, and autobiography in its attempt to understand the world through the use of flexible symbols (the Virgin and the Dynamo). The critic Robert E. Spiller once depicted the Education as the book that marked the American writer's entrance into the twentieth century. Drawing on symbols rather than "facts," Adams posed cosmic questions that literature, perhaps more than history, seemed best equipped to answer.

THE NEW HISTORY

As the nineteenth century merged into the twentieth, the multivolume overviews began to fade. The businessman James Ford Rhodes's seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1893–1906) and John Bach McMaster's eight-volume History of the People of the United States (1883–1913) showed that the genre had not quite expired, but they were the last of a breed. The day of the archive-based, specialized monograph had arrived.

In the introduction to his Study of History (1934–1961), the British historian Arnold Toynbee recalled how in the 1890s he watched the books on the shelves of a professor friend shift from general works to "the relentless advance of half a dozen specialized periodicals" (5:2). Subsequent multivolume series would all have multiple authors. The twenty-volume Dictionary of American Biography (begun in 1928), for example, drew on two thousand specialists.

Simultaneously with this shift, historians began to professionalize. Led by Herbert Baxter Adams, whom Woodrow Wilson once termed a "captain of industry" for scholarship, a group founded the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1884, with its flagship journal, the American Historical Review. Amateur historians continued to play a role until the late 1920s, but the trend was clear. More and more historians held advanced degrees and were affiliated with colleges or universities.

Simultaneously, the professional emphasis moved away from literature to a fascination with the social sciences (especially anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics), which, in turn, had all modeled themselves on the physical sciences, particularly biology and physics. The pre–World War I generation could concentrate on "scientific facts" because the world's value systems seemed firmly in place.

In the early years of the century, a group of "New Historians"—especially linked with Columbia and Cornell—set forth a number of agendas. The amateur historian Edward Eggleston had argued in 1900 that history as a scholarly discipline should try to recover the whole of a people's culture, not concern itself exclusively with war and politics. But the two foremost exponents of the "New History," James H. Robinson and Charles A. Beard, went even further. History should aid a people in improving their cultural life.

Born in Illinois, James H. Robinson (1863–1936) graduated from Harvard and earned a doctorate in Germany. He spent most of his career at Columbia, where his popular class in European intellectual history—nicknamed "the Downfall of Christianity"—enthralled scores of students. Robinson held great faith in the principles of the Enlightenment: He felt humankind was reasonable and that education would free people from an unhealthy reliance on church, state, and class. American citizens could be trusted to make appropriate political decisions. Robinson's The New History (1911) and The Mind in the Making (1921), which stretched from "our animal heritage" to "the sickness of an acquisitive society" (pp. 65, 71), called on historians to utilize insights from the social sciences not only to better understand the past but also to help bring in a more just social order. The proper purpose of history, he argued, was to enable people to understand themselves and help solve the social problems of the day. Carl Becker, who studied with Robinson, spread these ideas to the next generation from his position at Cornell.

Robinson's colleague at Columbia, Charles A. Beard (1874–1948), emerged as the most prominent spokesman for this group. Born in Indiana in 1874, he later received a doctorate from Columbia. His marriage to his DePauw classmate Mary Ritter (b. 1876) created the most powerful husband-wife duo in the profession. Beard achieved notoriety with his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). This classic book argued that the Founding Fathers relied less on Enlightenment ideals of timeless, universal republican truths than on hard economic concerns when they forged the Constitution in 1787. Drawing on research from the Treasury archives, Beard pointed out that most proponents of the Constitution held government securities that would surely rise in value if a strong central government could be put in place. Public outrage was immediate. Critics accused him of writing a muckraking exposé of the Enlightenment generation. Beard denied he was a Marxist—he was simply a follower of James Madison's economic philosophy, he said—and supporters defended him by noting that he offered only "An" economic interpretation (not "The"). But this façade disappeared two years later with his Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), which took a similar line of argument.

In 1917 Beard left Columbia over a dispute regarding loyalty oaths and, with Mary, devoted full time to writing. His economic critique of American life found ready audiences in the 1930s, and his 1933 AHA presidential address, "Written History as an Act of Faith," forms the classic statement that since history is relative, all historians should declare their prejudices at the onset and work for a more democratic society. His 1948 study President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, where he accused Roosevelt of maneuvering Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, marked him out as a bit of a crank. Even so, the Beards were probably the most widely read historians of the early twentieth century. As the New History showed, by the World War I era, history had shifted from a bed-fellow with literature to a steady companion of the social sciences.

RETURN OF THE GRAND NARRATIVE

But something was lost in this transition. As the grand narrative became replaced by specialized monographs, few citizens grasped a sense of the whole. As scholars at the end of the twentieth century have noted, for a nation to reflect a vital collective memory, it must share an (at least partially) agreed-upon historical past. A people realizes who they are by understanding who they have been. This became especially important for a pluralistic nation, which, thanks to the extensive immigration from Europe and Asia from the Gilded Age to World War I, the United States had truly become. Moreover, in spite of various attempts at professionalization, no historical guild could ever "control" the production of history, and it was not long before others began to present their versions of the grand narrative to the public as well.

Historical themes in theater, fiction, and film began to gain in popularity. Late-nineteenth-century theater groups often seized on such themes, such as the Revolution and the Frontier. The 1831 play The Lion of the West, about the life of Davy Crockett, was performed often, and an 1886 stage play based on the Civil War–era classic Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) proved a staple of traveling troupes until the mid-1920s. John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln (1918) and Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) continued this emphasis in the interwar period.

Historical fiction was popular, too. Edward Eggleston had fictionalized early frontier life in Indiana with his The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871). John W. De Forest did the same for the South with Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), as did Stephen Crane with The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Perhaps the classic expression of this genre—long before the advent of popular historical fiction by Kenneth Roberts in the 1930s—lay with Helen Hunt Jackson's romantic view of the Californios, Ramona (1884).

From 1900 forward, however, the ideal medium to re-create the grand narrative fell to film. The southern-born director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) showed well the power of this new medium. Based loosely on Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman (1905), The Birth of a Nation presented the white southern view of Reconstruction with intense visual power. In the climactic scene, the Ku Klux Klan, the heroes of this particular version, dip their emblem in the blood of a slain white girl before riding off to dispatch a band of villainous blacks.

Public reaction was immediate. White southern audiences cheered, while the NAACP staged formal protests. Crowds in Boston rioted. President Woodrow Wilson, who watched a private screening in the White House, initially described the movie as "writing history with lightning," although he later deplored the film's role in increasing racial tension.

With this, and the hundreds of historical films that Hollywood would later produce, the power of the broad-sweep narrative largely slipped from the hands of professional scholars to filmmakers. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Gone with the Wind (1939) still ranked as the most popular American film ever made. Although Gone with the Wind might seem a far cry from George Bancroft's ten-volume History of the United States or Francis Parkman's multiple-volume saga of New France, they shared a lot in common. Each provided a fast-paced dramatic "narrative of past events, [an] account, tale, story" that Americans could relate to, positively or negatively, to better understand the complex story of their nation, and, of course, themselves.

see alsoThe Education of Henry Adams; Frontier

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Abel, Annie Heloise. The Slaveholding Indians. 3 vols. Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark, 1915–1925.

Adams, Henry. The History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. 9 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889–1891.

Bancroft, George. History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent. 10 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1834–1875.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530–1888. San Francisco: The History Company, 1890.

Beard, Charles A. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1913.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870. New York: Longmans, Green, 1896.

Earle, Alice Morse. The Sabbath in Puritan New England. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891.

Fiske, John. The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1888.

Lord, John. Beacon Lights of History. 8 vols. New York: W. H. Wise, 1921.

Parkman, Francis. A Half-Century of Conflict. Boston: Little, Brown, 1892.

Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery; A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. New York and London: D. Appleton, 1918.

Robinson, James H. The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1921.

Semple, Ellen Churchill. American History and Its Geographic Conditions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903.

Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. 12 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1934–1962.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: H. Holt, 1920.

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Ferenc M. Szasz