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The American Past: Is it Still Usable?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

J. R. Pole
J. R. Pole
Affiliation:
Churchill College, Cambridge
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Extract

The past, in the course of its ever-recurring encounters with the demands inflicted on it by the present, enjoys one inestimable advantage: it cannot answer, it is not even listening. ‘We ask and ask, thou smilest and art still’, we might almost say, giving to Arnold's ponderous lines a touch of unintended meaning. In spite of appearances to the contrary, even the American past is in the same position. Even after the lapse (the ‘revolution’, as Gibbon would have said) of more than three and a half centuries of continuous settlement, the historian who has been educated entirely in the tradition and the environment of the United States needs rather more than his European contemporary's normal degree of subtlety if he is to free himself from the peculiarly American version of the space-time continuum.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1967 , pp. 63 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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