The New American History

...A literal interpretation of the most famous phrases of the Declaration of Independence has served as the rallying cry for the most successful reform movements in American history...

...The new historians, many of whom came of age during the contentious 1960s, attack this paradigm and draw attention to ideological cleavages and deeply rooted social conflicts...

...This approach mirrors the emphasis of most social history, but does it do justice to the influence on race policies and ideologies that, for better or worse, individual black leaders have sometimes exercised...

...That the United States has not had an internal revolution—unless one so defines the reactionary rebellion of the southern states—and has not changed its basic form of government or come close to doing so in more than two hundred years are obvious facts that those assessing the conflict/ consensus equation need to take into account...

...Furthermore, the "new western history," with its view of the frontier as a locus of clashes between diverse peoples and cultures, receives no attention at all...

...In an age of powerful presidents who can send the nation to war on their own authority, it is hard to avoid paying some attention to history at the top and to the biographies of our elected monarchs...

...It might be more useful to recognize that the dissenting populist or radical-democratic ideologies were as time-bound and inadequate for the needs of our postindustrial world as those of the modernizers and consolidators...

...The fact that all the contributors to the volume teach in eastern or midwestern universities may have encouraged what many westerners are likely to consider a somewhat blinkered view of American development...

...But a few such efforts do get mentioned in other contexts, and it is arguable that comparative history has not quite emerged as an approach that deserves to be singled out from the kinds of history treated herein that make use of a comparative perspective— social, women's, African-American, labor, and diplomatic...

...In the period between World War II and the Vietnam War, historical writing emphasized the consensus that held America together and allegedly prevented the kind of class or group conflict that had bedeviled other societies...

...Awareness that the efforts of past reformers have come to nought or been betrayed does not necessarily indicate pessimism about the future, but it is sobering to confront a historiography that seems to find so little basis in the past for expecting that tomorrow will be a better day...

...In short, we are beginning to get a history of the triumphs and tragedies of the entire American population and not just of the relatively privileged and powerful...

...One suspects, however, that historians who identify strongly with struggles for black, women's, or working-class liberation fear that celebration of past accomplishments will decrease the pressure for further changes...

...But it is also significant that the normal idiom of resistance against power, privilege, and injustice has derived from the eighteenth-century language of individual rights rather than from communitarian conceptions that subordinate the individual to the group...

...As someone who has worked mostly on the nineteenth century, I found the essays on earlier and later periods especially illuminating...

...Is it not at least conceivable that another leader (one thinks of some of Lincoln's rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860) would have tried harder to restore the "Old Union" with results that can only be guessed at but that might have altered the course of American history...

...In a cogent analysis of recent trends in social history, Alice Kessler Harris calls attention to the opportunities for historical synthesis that are offered by the new concept of "social formation...

...The Lockean liberalism that allegedly narrowed the American ideological spectrum does not fully account for the range of disagreement over basic social and economic questions...

...I am less certain, however, that we have a great deal to learn from the past "losers" glorified by some of the new historians...

...It is also possible that irreversible factors will erode the capacity of the economy to deliver the consumerist satisfactions that are the main contemporary guarantor of the individualist ethos...

...those based on other forms of human differentiation have an impact that can stretch the Marxist framework to the breaking point and beyond...

...I am also tempted to complain that Foner and company slight comparative approaches to American history and should have included a chapter on recent efforts to place American developments in an international context or to make sustained comparisons between American institutions or processes and their analogues in other societies...

...Conflict has resulted mostly from differing conceptions of who is included among those "created equal" and endowed with "inalienable rights".—was it all white men, all native-born men, all heterosexual human beings, or all people regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation?—rather than from disagreements over the value of personal liberty and equality for those possessing it...

...certainly "class conflict" in one form or another is often made a prominent feature of the historical process...

...The decline of the parties had expanded access to government of the well-organized and the unpoor, but not for others...

...There has been no effective refutation of the conclusion of some earlier historians that Lincoln's personal influence as president-elect in the winter of 1860-61 prevented a territorial compromise that might have averted or (more likely) postponed the Civil War...

...Hence there has been ample room for conflict over the meaning and application of national ideals, but the other side of the coin is that a discursive agreement on the ideals has helped to make these conflicts soluble or at least manageable...

...Change is no longer viewed as linear or dialectical progress toward the goal of liberty or equality...

...Two-directional history is superior to history from either the bottom up or the top down...

...But the general tenor of the collection is perhaps better described as "post-Marxist," a term I find more accurate than "neo-Marxist" to describe scholarship that derives substantially from the Marxist tradition but has gone well beyond it...

...It is historians of this kind who are currently engaged in a creative dialogue with the postmodernist thought that is having such a powerful influence on other humanistic disciplines...

...In his generally authoritative essay on AfricanAmerican history, Thomas H. Holt fails to mention Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., and makes only passing references to Booker T. Washington and W.E.B...

...Societies where conflicting groups have not shared a common language of aspiration and entitlement, such as France in the 1790s, Russia in 1917, and several contemporary societies that have fractured along ethnoreligious lines, have lacked the capacity for reform and minimal cohesiveness that the United States has conspicuously demonstrated over much of its history...

...But the general quality of the essays is high...

...This is not an argument for American exceptionalism...

...This term refers not merely to class but also to the construction of group identities and relationships on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender...

...the new history is characterized above all by a shift of attention to the behavior and outlook of the masses of people excluded from the corridors of power: to working classes, minorities (especially blacks), and women...

...But would another president who was less innovative, less politically adept, and more attached to the rights of states and slaveholders on which the antebellum union had been based have responded so effectively to these and other pressures...

...There have also been struggles, going back to the Jacksonian period, over whether modern capitalistic institutions frustrate or encourage the liberation and self-determination of the individual...

...One does not have to support a return to the great-man theory of history to believe that some of the recent scholarship surveyed in The New American History tends to overlook the role that strategically placed individuals can play in responding to the "social formations" that limit their options but do not necessarily determine their decisions...

...Taken as a whole, however, the volume offers an opportunity to reflect on the "new American history" that has emerged in the past twenty years or so and to contrast it with the dominant historiography of the preceding era...

...they will be of value not only to high school teachers and to general readers who wish to know what academic historians are currently doing but also to graduate students and professors of American history...

...Paradoxically, the lack of a progressive past is seen as the spur to a progressive future...

...I think one can predict that this volume will look old fashioned in a few years because of its lack of any sustained attention to the "new intellectual/cultural history...

...Individual essays vary in the extent to which they attempt to synthesize recent scholarship in a comprehensive way...

...Under the influence of the New Left, Marxist theories and categories gained new respect in the American historical writing of the seventies and eighties, especially in social history, and several of the essays in this volume reflect this influence...

...The case of Gorbachev may lead one to wonder, for example, if Lincoln's statesmanship was so unimportant in the Civil War era as a reader would be likely to conclude from Foner's essay...

...Acknowledging more explicitly what was accomplished by progressive social or political movements, as well as showing what they failed to accomplish, might provide a better balanced, and slightly more hopeful, view...

...As they approach the present, the period essays do place some emphasis on major public figures...

...According to Eric Foner, for example, the new scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction demonstrates that blacks played a major role in bringing about their own emancipation and enfranchisement rather than being, as in much of the older historiography, the passive beneficiaries of actions by white politicians and generals...

...One of the many lessons that historians might draw from the unanticipated events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is that creative and strategically placed individual leaders can make a difference, if not to the main directions of political and social development, at least to the pace and character of major transformations...

...Alan Brinkley deems the personal qualities of Hoover and Roosevelt worthy of attention, and William Chafe discusses the leadership of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan (although, following the current fashion in civil-rights historiography, he downplays Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Another obvious feature of the new history is its stress on dissensus and conflict...

...As a fairly recent immigrant to California, I have a sense that teachers in the Golden State will be distressed by the predominantly East Coast view of ethnic history that one finds here...

...The national gospel of indii7idual self-fulfillment could well turn out to be an inadequate foundation for the degree of collective endeavor and curtailment of individual prerogatives that is likely to be required by the environmental crisis...

...In a striking essay on the colonial period, John Murrin shows that the settlement of English America was not the success story of our national mythology but a catastrophe for most of the people involved, especially Native Americans, blacks, and lower-class whites...

...several other nations have manifested equal or greater continuity and cohesiveness...

...Whether based on Lockean, classical Republican, Evangelical Christian, Transcendentalist, or modern SUMMER • 1991 • 431 Books secular-humanist foundations, the standard aspiration of American thinkers and movements has been the freedom, independence, and fulfillment (or salvation) of the individual human being...

...Du Bois...

...Somewhere in such a survey one should be able to find a consideration of the work of historians such as David Hollinger, Thomas Haskell, James Kloppenberg, Thomas Bender, Dorothy Ross, Neil Harris, Alan Trachtenberg, Jackson Lears, and John Diggins— to name a few of those who analyze ideas and cultural forms in ways that suggest a revitalization of cultural/intellectual studies...

...T thirteen essays in this volume were originally commissioned by the American Historical Association as a series of pamphlets to acquaint schoolteachers with the latest trends in historical writing about the United States...

...But intellectual/ cultural history has been flourishing of late, and its distinctive approaches have enriched the study of social and political development...

...many of them argue that the "consensus" was really the hegemonic ideology of a dominant group and never fully succeeded in conquering the consciousness of the subordinated social elements...

...Does anyone imagine that if Brezhnev had lived for another decade or been succeeded as Soviet leader by an apparatchik of the same mold that the world would have been transformed so suddenly and dramatically as it has since Gorbachev came to power...

...Richard L. McCormick concludes that the "Progressive" reforms of the early twentieth century "did not come close to equalizing influence within American life...

...In this way they will show the need for new political thought, new interdisciplinary perspectives on the human condition, and a growth in cosmopolitan awareness that the problems of the world require solutions that no single nation's special traditions and experiences are able to provide...

...I also wonder if the dissensus or conflict model has not at times been applied too relentlessly to make sense of the cohesive capacities that American society has often demonstrated...

...An interest in epistemology, both in the purely historical sense of how people in the past perceived the world and acquired knowledge of it and in the methodological sense of how historians themselves know what they claim to know, is likely (for better or worse) to increase among historians in the future...

...At the less ambitious end of the spectrum James Shenton provides little more than a bibliographical essay on the recent scholarship concerning ethnicity and immigration...

...Native Americans make an appearance in essays on the colonial and revolutionary periods, but little is said about them in the contributions on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

...It may be that we can learn something about ecology from Native American or self-sufficient white farming communities and about alternative ways of looking at the world from the pockets of antimodernism that persisted for a time despite the triumph of commercial and industrial capitalism...

...Some historians celebrated this "liberal consensus" as the triumph of pragmatism over ideology while others deplored it as parochial and anti-intellectual...

...At particular moments the actions of those holding great power affect the destinies of their followers in crucial ways, and it would sentimentalize the past to think otherwise...

...Because most university historians specialize in the subject matter of only one or two of the thirteen periods or topics covered, they will learn a great deal about what is 428 • DISSENT Books occurring outside their own bailiwicks...

...An equally serious limitation, in my view, is the absence of an essay on intellectual and cultural history...

...There is no way for a reviewer to do justice to the individual essays...

...Toward SUMMER • 1991 • 429 Books the end of her survey of new scholarship in the dynamic field of women's history, Linda Gordon notes that "there is little evidence of an overall improvement in women's employment status" in recent years despite the enormous increase of women in the labor force...

...At the very least, Lincoln is still worthy of study, and the recent work of one or two prominent Lincoln scholars should have been mentioned...

...The earlier consensus historiography can be faulted for its failure to account adequately for such conflicts as the crisis over slavery, the labor strife of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the modern movements for social liberation...

...With all its virtues—and they are many—the volume will not satisfy everyone's conception of what topics or fields need to be viewed as part of the "new American history...

...Little in the recent historiography provides a basis for the revival of a Whiggish or liberal/progressive view of American history as the gradual unfolding of a national dream of freedom and equality for all citizens...

...In several other essays the growth of commercial and industrial capitalism is viewed from the vantage point of the losers — semisubsistence farmers and independent craftsmen, for example—and the human cost of economic modernization is stressed more than its benefits...

...But I suspect that the most helpful lesson that American historians can teach to those grappling with the impending crises of the next century will come not so much from exalting the alternative Americas of past rebels and dissenters as in showing that the views of all our ancestors were far removed from what our own are likely to be or must become...

...Such an eclectic, post-Marxist dissensus model seems to be implicit in several of the best essays in the volume and in a good deal of the most innovative recent historical scholarship...

...The Marxist emphasis on conflict and the pursuit of hegemony is retained, but the identities and relationships based on economics or forces of production are not all-powerful...

...One has to face facts, but is such an accentuation of the negative always justified...

...but most agreed that the centripetal forces were much stronger than the centrifugal ones...

...At one extreme, Sean Wilentz makes "the market revolution" the central and unifying theme of the period 1815 to 1848...

...Before the 1960s, most historians focused on the thought and action of white male elites...

...The contributors are well known and highly regarded specialists on various subfields of American history...

...Reference has already been made to John Murrin's view of colonization as catastrophe...

...As emancipator, Lincoln was indeed forced into action partly as the result of the initiative of the slaves in deserting the plantations and crossing into Union lines, thereby inviting the government to view slavery as defunct and the freedmen as a source of manpower for the Union cause...

...There is scarcely any coverage of the emerging fields of Mexican-American and AsianAmerican history...

...Despite such lacunae and others that might be mentioned (lack of attention to "the new economic history," recent trends in such specialized fields as legal history and the history of science and technology, and the efforts of some to revive the tradition of political-military narrative), the volume does a reasonably good job of summing up what the 430 • DISSENT Books majority of younger American historians are interested in and what are likely to be their main interpretive assumptions...

...Intellectual history was at the core of the consensus historiography of the fifties and early sixties, and it therefore makes some sense to view the "new history" as a move from a paradigm based on intellectual history to one that draws on social history for much of its sustenance...

...A third characteristic of the new history, which distinguishes it from traditional Marxist and liberal approaches, is the absence of teleology...

...We are clearly paying the price for much of the "progress" of the past, and American historians are within their rights to make judgments on past "winners" that take into account what their triumphs ultimately produced...

...The emphasis on "history from the bottom up" and on "social formations" as the engines of change has been a valuable corrective to viewing elites and great men as the main historical actors, but it is possible that the pendulum has swung too far in this direction...

...The fact that these broadly liberal or libertarian assumptions are now being questioned—by "communitarian" thinkers on the political left or those on "the cultural left" who are deconstructing the individual-rights tradition—should not lead to a reading of the American past that denies two centuries of philosophical agreement...

...Although I share some of these assumptions, I have doubts about others and wonder how they will stand up under criticism during the next few years...

...If the ideals of the eighteenth century served the majority of Americans reasonably well in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth, there seems little doubt that they will have some difficulty meeting the challenge of the twenty-first...

...To some extent this contribution is acknowledged within essays covering periods or topics, but much of it is not...

...None of them, to my knowledge, has surrendered to the nihilistic notion that history is just another form of fiction, but they are working on the interdisciplinary frontiers of contemporary thought and scholarship to an extent that social historians may no longer be...

...William H. Chafe provides an equally sobering assessment of efforts to achieve equality in the period since World War •II: "Notwithstanding changes in matters of race and gender, the basic alignment of classes in the United States is much the same as it was in 1940 and in recent years has become even more rigid...

...The primacy of social history or "history from the bottom up" is reflected not only in the fine essays on social history, African-American history, women's history, and labor history, but also in the discussions of historical work on specific periods that cover major political developments...