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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
A sea-change has occurred in political historywriting since the 1950s. Gone, for the most part, are many of the broad, sweeping generalizations that used to characterize this field. The terms employed in such endeavors—the American Mind, the American Way of Life, American Civilization, the American Spirit (all titles of books published in the mid-twentieth century)—seem anachronistic, if not downright ridiculous, today. Whatever it is that defines the values and direction of American politics, this set of cultural markers seems a good deal more elusive today than it did to scholars like Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Richard Hofstadter in the postwar era. In the place of studies of America, the disciplines of history, political science, and sociology have turned to careful, highly focused studies of particular eras, areas, and groups. National character is out, local cultures are in.
1. Bender, Thomas, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73 (June 1986): 128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am, needless to say, indebted to Bender's insightful piece. 1 am skeptical, however, about whether the notion of a “public culture” offers a way out of this problem of balkanization. In any case, Bender's concern is with the discipline of history as a whole, while mine is on the subfield of political history (including the work of historically-oriented political scientists). This may explain my greater reliance on theory rather than culture.
2. See Merton, Robert, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1957), 5–10.Google Scholar
3. Applehy, Joyce, “Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism,” Journal of American History 79 (09 1992).Google Scholar
4. Ibid., 431.
5. Ibid., 421.
6. Ibid., 428.
7. Ibid., 429-30.
8. There are, of course, some wonderful crossnational studies organized around these conceptual categories, so I do not mean to suggest that this approach has been utterly neglected. See, for example, Woodward, C. Vann, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (New York, 1968)Google Scholar ; Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar ; Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1986).Google Scholar For a review of recent excursions into foreign territory, see Fredrickson, George M., “From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-national Comparative History,” Journal of American History 82 (09 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9. One notable exception is Smith, Rogers, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87 (09 1993): 549–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar More surprising than the absence of a new Hartz is the general absence of synthetic statements on favored issues like race, ethnicity, class, and gender. There are a few, to be sure, but they are somehow not as impressive as the previous generations’ output—for example, Gunnar Myrdal on race, Oscar Handlin, John Higham, and Stephen Thernstrom on ethnicity, and Seymour Martin Lipset on class. Gender is perhaps the only category in which the newer generation has unambiguously taken the field.