History in crisis

...A few highly visible Marxists have been honored by the profession-radical scholars Eugene Genovese, William Appleman Williams, and Gerda Lerner have been chosen in recent years as presidents of the Organization of American Historians...

...Ethnic studies, for example, often fell into a pluralist model which celebrated the resiliency of diverse immigrant cultures while avoiding a hard-headed analysis of which groups exercised more or less power in shaping American society...

...In place of conventional narratives of political and intellectual development, American historians in the seventies produced an abundance of works in the various subfields of social investigation: family history...

...Handlin found it easy to score points against some of the abuses of recent scholarship-the penchant, of some writers, for example, for painting American Indians as ecological communards (or, alternatively, virtuous Jeffersonian yeomen) before the coming of the whites...

...There is still, of course, a resistance to Marxist concepts among most American historians...

...the history of sexuality, criminality, and childhood...

...This emphasis on "culture" as opposed to power was typical of what some have called the "depoliticization" of the new histories...

...Even political history, when studied at all, was transformed by a new emphasis on the local impact of ethnic and religious divisions, and disdain for the study of national leaders and ideological issues...

...The theme of last year's Organization of American Historians convention was "To Study the People...

...The New York Times reported a "fantastic escalation" in the financial value of Americana in the late seventies...

...This growing radical presence has not, however, with the notable exception of the critique of American imperialism by revisionist diplomatic historians, checked the depoliticization of historical studies...

...At the same time, the traditional field of intellectual history was left by the wayside, its practitioners beleaguered and haunted by self-doubt in the face of persistent charges that its concern with major thinkers was "elitist," and its literary sources (when compared with quantitative data) "impressionistic...

...Under the impact of the new focus on "history from the bottom up," old fields were transformed and new ones sprang into being...

...If the divorce of academic history from the general reading public has been disastrous, the separation of radical historians from any larger social movement has been equally debilitating...

...It raises anew the question of the role of the radical academic, especially at a time with little prospect for far-reaching social change...

...At any rate, such films, generally financed by public funds, are likely to be an early casualty of the Reagan administration and the slashing of appropriations for the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...But Handlin's screed fell to pieces the moment one reflected that during his imaginary golden age when historians respected Truth, blacks, women, and yes, Indians, somehow found themselves excluded from portraits of the American experience...

...Labor history, previously confined to institutional studies of labor unions (which have never embraced a majority of the working population in this country), now came to focus on the culture and lifestyles of laboring people...

...One way or another, it seems that an audience (or market) continues to exist for history, but not for academic historians...

...Oral history, another methodology in vogue in the 1970s, possessed great value as a way of recovering the history of those who left no written records, but it sometimes seemed to reject the notion of historical interpretation altogether, substituting simply the raw experience of the interviewees...

...One result of these methodological innovations was the precipitous decline of the traditional historical narrative in favor of specialized, methodologically sophisticated studies...

...American Studies, previously concerned with exploring the connections between history and literature, now delved into popu-' lar culture, defined as including everything from movies to comic strips...

...At the same time a new technology- the computer - made possible the analysis of vast amounts of data concerning "anonymous Americans," enabling historians to focus on the experiences of ordinary individuals rather than a small, articulate elite...

...social mobility studies...

...Nonetheless, groups like the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization and such journals as the Radical History Review and Review of Radical Political Economy-two among a dozen Marxist-oriented journals in various academic fields-have already made a substantial impact...

...The survival of history as an intellectual discipline may well be at stake.ectual discipline may well be at stake...

...THESE advances, however, did not add up to a coherent new vision of the American past...

...Its nearly one hundred panesl included papers on everything from the boll weevil to Chicano murals, while virtually ignoring national politics, as if this were irrelevant to "the People's experience...

...A recent poll by the New York Daily News found that history and biography were the most popular types of books among its readership, followed closely by mysteries...

...I IF ANYTHING WAS characteristic of the new histories of the 1970s, it was the precipitous decline of politics as a subject of inquiry...

...This decline of academic history was, in fact, ironic because it occurred in the face of a remarkably creative outpouring of scholarly writing about the American past, indeed nothing less than a veritable redefinition of historical studies in America, in which a traditional emphasis on institutions and events, politics and ideas, was superseded by a host of "social" concerns...

...Most pervasive was the influence of quantification, which often shaped the contours of historical investigation, determining the issues to be studied and according undue weight to variables, like ethnicity, for which statistical data happened to be available...

...The concern with non-elites, first raised as a political rallying cry by left historians in the 1960s, has been appropriated, in the new social history, by a romantic nostalgia for past lower-class cultures...

...How we got from the heroic days of past conflicts to the heartless world of today, is a question rarely considered...

...Under the portentous title Truth in History, Oscar Hand-lin issued a philippic against the new historians for distorting past reality for current political purposes...

...Older coherent interpretations of the American past, ranging from Turner's frontier thesis to the consensus theories of the 1950s have been shattered...

...Studies of past instances of labor conflict or radical politics, for example, can be illuminating in their own right, but, as with popular leftist historical films like Northern Lights and The Wobblies, their impact often rests on an unstated comparison with the dull and conservative present...

...To a large extent, this transformation was a byproduct of the ferment of the 1960s and the political objectives of the New Left...

...Lacking a clear methodology of its own, history was perhaps more susceptible than other disciplines to the adverse impact of vogueish methodological innovations...

...Most historians probably have come to recognize in the transformation of historical scholarship a healthy infusion of new perspectives into the discipline.* Historians in the 1970s delved into areas hitherto all but ignored (the history of sexuality, for example) and reintroduced a sense of complexity to their studies, forcing all writers to adopt a more critical posture towards their evidence and calling into question broad generalizations based on fragmentary data or the experiences of a few eminent individuals...

...The popularity of interdisciplinary history, stimulated by, among other things, guidelines for government grants, led to an invasion of social science jargon, which seemed to provide a more "scientific" foundation for historical studies...

...History, which ERIC FONER, professor of history at City College, City University of New York, is the author of Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford University...

...It was of course, the decade of the Bicentennial, "Rootsomania," and nostalgia...

...It fosters a view of history not as a mode of collective self-education or a vehicle for social change, but rather, an escape from an unappealing present...

...The university, however, is one of the few arenas in American society where radicals of the sixties have found a comfortable niche while still professing radicalism...

...Like gold and rare stamps, old manuscripts and memorabilia were finding favor with investors as a hedge against inflation...

...Paradoxically, while academic history fell into depression, popular interest in the past enjoyed a minor boom...

...At the same time, by contrast, historian Ellen DuBois lamented in Feminist Studies that women's history was losing its original political dimension in a preoccupation with women's private lives...

...The tasks confronting historians in the 1980s are formidable indeed: to reawaken an interest in history among a student body whose high school education leaves it bereft of any sense of historical understanding, to bridge the gap separating the academy from a broader reading public, and to make history once again a way of illuminating the present, without succumbing either to a romanticized nostalgia or an ahistorical present-mindedness...

...Declining undergraduate enrollments, dwindling graduate applications and the much-publicized job crisis cast a pall over history departments, while conventions of historians took on an unmistakable air of gloom...

...Depending on the point of view, this represented either a professional coming of age, or a retreat from the political impulse which had spawned labor, women's, and black history in the first place...

...A book of mine was criticized a few years ago (in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, of all places) for quoting Karl Marx, on the ground that his writings are irrelevant to America...

...The failure to consider politics-by which I mean not simply voting behavior and legislative alignments, but the ways in which power in civil society is ordered and exercised-often left social history bereft of the larger context which alone could have imparted a broader meaning to its findings...

...The portrait of America which emerged from the 1970s was of a nation constantly at war with itself, divided along lines of race, class, gender, and region...

...If earlier historians ignored local differences in grandiose generalizations about "the American character," today the notion of a unified national experience seems almost impossible to maintain...

...The broadening of historians' * There are, of course, dissenters...

...Popular historical writers like Barbara Tuchman remained on the best seller list for months...

...Perhaps the shift from the public to the private sphere as a point of historical reference is not surprising in view of the political trajectory of the "me decade...

...Meanwhile, whole new fields came into existence...

...The growth of Marxism in numerous fields, especially among younger scholars, has been nothing short of astounding (and has been commented upon, with varying degrees of alarm, in Business Week and the National Review...

...Indeed, what was most striking in the 1970s was the fragmentation of historical scholarship and the larger notion of social process itself...

...Indeed, only a small number of historians continue to believe that a comprehensive view of the American past is possible...

...At their best, the new histories moved far beyond compensation for earlier neglect, to portray the involvement of blacks, women, and laboring people as active historical agents, rather than passive victims of exploitation...

...But what is disturbing is that, despite the wealth of recent material, no new synthesis has emerged to fill the void...

...The problem was accompanied by an obsession with method which sometimes eclipsed the larger purposes of the writing of history...

...Fred Hechinger last year gave his seal of approval to black studies programs in The New York Times Magazine, declaring they had "outgrown their radical origins...

...Blacks, followed by women, ethnics, and other groups, looked to history for a " usable past," and condemned their virtual exclusion from traditional historical narratives...

...concerns went hand in hand, it seemed, with a narrowing of their vision...

...once enjoyed a favored place in the liberal arts curriculum, was forced by the widespread abolition of required courses to compete for increasingly job-oriented students in the war of all against all of the academic marketplace...

...But younger scholars still face political discrimination, often disguised because of the job crisis, and even a Marxist "star" like Genovese was, like Bertell Oilman before him, turned down for a position at the University of Maryland...

...Black history, previously confined to the black colleges, had by the close of the 1970s gained a foothold in programs at scores of universities, and transformed the way nearly every survey course was taught, And women's history, virtually non-existent before the rise of today's feminism, produced some of the most innovative historical studies of the decade...

...This only widened the gap between academic history and the general reading public, which preferred narrative and interpretive accounts to accumulation of data...