From the standpoint of the historical profession's founding program of objectivity, the most troubling aspect of interwar historiography was its failure to converge—to move toward a single, integrated edifice of historical truth.

Before the war this had seemed a plausible goal. The profession was only beginning to accumulate reliable, documented monographs on various aspects of the American past, and matters were not that much farther advanced in other fields of history. Historical production was still at the stage of “primitive accumulation.” It did not, at that point, seem palpably absurd for historians to devote themselves, as Jameson put it, to “making bricks without much idea of how the architects will use them.” To alter the metaphor, when first beginning to assemble a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, no one is troubled by their inability to foresee where a particular piece will fit. The prewar concentration on the political and constitutional realms furthered optimism about a convergent, cumulative picture emerging—in American history, as the successive completion of studies of parallel processes in the different states, and of developments in successive periods, promised to eventuate in an overarching narrative synthesis; in European history, as studies of various countries fell into the Actonian paradigm of advancing liberty, democracy, and international comity. There was, overall, substantial agreement on the picture that would emerge when all the pieces had been fitted together, and it was possible to see ways in which monographic work carried out within the framework of that picture actually was falling into place.