Filiopiety and Criticism:
BRAEMAN, JOHN
Filiopiety and Criticism Recording America's Past. By David D. Van Tassel. Chicago, 223 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by John Braeman Contributor, "Indiana Magazine of History" One of the more notable...
...biographers—and here Parson Weems set the pattern—wrote hero-worshipping and filiopietistic lives of the founding fathers...
...Underlying this interest is a new sense of pride on the part of American historians, a feeling that American historical writing has reached maturity and that the time has come to survey and summarize what has been done and what remains undone...
...But how can this formula explain the work of the disinterested student of history, the seeker after truth for its own sake...
...During and after the Civil War, historians on each side of the Mason-Dixon line championed their section...
...The heyday of the amateur historian was drawing to a close...
...Most of the works published so far are biographical or topical in their treatment...
...The earliest histories of America, Van Tassel shows, were largely promotion tracts to attract settlers and investors...
...When the struggle raged between the colonists and the mother country, colonial historians searched to find historic rights justifying American resistance to the new regulations and restrictions...
...The centennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence stimulated a vast outpouring of patriotic hymns to the founding fathers designed to bind the nation's wounds...
...The most significant contribution of his book is its rescue of such men as Henry B. Dawson, John Gilmary Shea and Hubert Howe Bancroft from the neglect they have suffered...
...Their work laid the foundation upon which the later professional historians would build...
...Eighteen eighty-four witnessed the culmination of their work...
...Yet his book is, in the final analysis, disappointing...
...The heroes of Van Tassel's study are the pioneers of the critical spirit who flourished between the 1840s and 1880s...
...He has sought to learn "how did historiography develop in a country made up of a people on the move, whose story is one of successive breaks with the past and outspoken commitment to the future...
...He has not, in brief, said why American historical studies developed as they did...
...The relationship between the historian and his times is far more subtle and complex than this answer indicates...
...Earnest antiquarians glorified the role played by their locality or state in winning independence...
...By the late 1840s, with the rise of a new generation of historians farther removed from the Revolution, filiopiety began to wane...
...But Van Tassel demonstrates their achievements, and these were substantial...
...But David D. Van Tassel, of the History Department of the University of Texas, has dealt with this subject from a different angle in his book, Recording America's Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607-1884...
...Then in the late 1870s, when wartime passions had subsided, historians joined in promoting sectional reconciliation...
...While the historian is influenced by the social and intellectual milieu in which he lives, this does not mean that historical studies in America have developed, as Van Tassel holds, "in response to contemporary needs...
...The simple formula of challenge and response may explain the textbook writer or popularizer seeking a profitable market...
...Van Tassel praises the achievements of the critical school of local historians...
...Northern writers glorified the Union cause as another victory in the continuing struggle for human freedom, while the Southerners sought to vindicate the "lost cause...
...Van Tassel has not succeeded in drawing into a meaningful synthesis all the strands of historical writing in the United States during the more than two-and-a-half centuries from 1607 to 1884...
...Its fundamental defect is its acceptance of a simple deterministic formula...
...The answer is that Parkman was "a genius standing alone...
...These men were local historians and amateurs—a damning indictment so far as the professional historian of today is concerned...
...And 1884 marked the beginning of a new era in American historical writing...
...After the war, American historians justified the Revolution as a struggle not merely for the rights of the colonists but for the rights of all mankind...
...Was American historical writing before 1884 devoid of such men...
...These men were largely responsible for the collection, preservation and publication of innumerable documents essential to the study of American history which might have otherwise been lost...
...Does his formula explain Richard Hildreth...
...In that year, a hand of zealous young scholars, fresh from the German universities and champions of the scientific method, founded the American Historical Association to give a new direction to historical studies in this country...
...But their work was interrupted by the worsening sectional conflict...
...Does his formula explain Francis Parkman...
...and the romantic nationalists headed by George Bancroft subordinated the story of the individual colony or state to the larger theme of the growth of a single nation...
...And the guiding assumption underlying his work is that "historical studies developed in America in response to contemporary needs...
...A group of younger, local historians sought to infuse a new critical spirit into the study of the history of their regions and looked with a skeptical eye upon oft-repeated stories...
...The publication that year of Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America stands as a monument to their achievements...
...Then Puritan ministers turned to history to remind their straying flocks of the purposes of the settlement and penalties for impiety...
...His concern is more with trends and causes than with the work of individual historians...
...Van Tassel himself does not wholly accept that answer: "The reasons," he writes, "why these men shunned the practices of their filiopietistic elders were almost as numerous as the men who gave allegiance to the new critical spirit...
...Although these developments impeded the growth of a critical spirit, many local historians imbued with that spirit resumed at the war's end the task of fostering critical historical scholarship in the United States...
...Reviewed by John Braeman Contributor, "Indiana Magazine of History" One of the more notable phenomena of recent historical scholarship in the United States has been the increasingly large number of studies of American historiography...
...The answer is that "Hildreth stood apart from his contemporaries" as the forerunner of the scientific history of a later era...
...He has set out to examine the whole range of American historical studies from the first settlers to the founding of the American Historical Association...
...Van Tassel has provided a salutary corrective to the stress laid by so many students of American historiography upon the Prescotts, the Bancrofts and the Parkmans...
...But was the difference simply that they were farther away from the Revolution than their predecessors had been...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 9
