No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The New History and the Sense of Social Purpose in American Historical Writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
Extract
Historians have often been inspired by the power of spiritually high ideals or socially good intentions, sometimes by both. Orosius, a disciple of Augustine, composed his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans to prove that nations which had submitted themselves to non-Christian rulers had thereby incurred a series of disasters. The legend that Brutus of Troy had founded Britain was thought useful by King James I. Both in the earlier and later stages of the development of concepts of verification with regard to historical records, the idea of a past whose example points the way to present and future conduct or which gives validity to the régime of the present has been an extraordinarily potent instrument of social policy. The social instrumentalists who emerged, among the political scientists, econo-mists, sociologists, philosophers and historians of the western world about the end of the last century were hardly less ambitious than their predecessors. Among them, the American school was particularly confident of what could be achieved by wresting the study, teaching and writing of history from the hands of its orthodox exponents and redirecting the entire subject in the interests of social advance. There is an obvious temptation to describe this school as historical utilitarians, a word that suggests itself particularly because of their long emphasis on the use and usability of the past. But the term is inappropriate. Utilitarianism is a system which envisages the greatest good of the greatest number; whereas an instrumental view could be directed to special problems or be intended to promote the interests of a particular group.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1973
References
1 Robinson, James Harvey, The New History (N.Y. 1912)Google Scholar.
2 Barnes, Henry Elmer, History of Historical Writing (Norman, Okla., 1932)Google Scholar.
3 Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (N.Y., 1968), p. 438Google Scholar; Higham, John, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), p. 131Google Scholar.
4 May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence (London, 1960), p. 164Google Scholar.
5 Smith, Theodore Clarke, ‘The Writing of American History in America from 1884 to 1934’, American Historical Review, xl (04 1935)Google Scholar.
6 Beard, Charles A., ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’, American Historical Review, xxxix (01 1934)Google Scholar. Read, Conyers, ‘The Social Responsibilities of the Historian’, American Historical Review, lv (01 1950)Google Scholar.
8 Randall, J. H. Jr and Haines, George IV, ‘Controlling Assumptions’, in Theory and Practice in Historical Study: A Report of the Committee on Historiography, ed. Curti, Merle, SSRC Bulletin 54 (N.Y., 1946), p. 51Google Scholar.
9 Martin, James J., ‘History and Social Intelligence’, in Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader, ed. Goddard, Arthur (Colorado Springs, 1968), p. 241Google Scholar.
10 For example, Zinn, Howard, ‘Abolitionists, Freedom-Riders and the Tactics of Agitation’, in The Anti-Slavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, ed. Duberman, Martin (Princeton, 1965)Google Scholar.
11 In Beard's review of Bentley, Arthur F., The Process of Government (1908), Political Science Quarterly, xxiii (1908)Google Scholar.
12 Hofstadter, , The Progressive Historians, p. 141Google Scholar.
13 Wilkins, Burleigh Taylor, ‘Frederick York Powell and Charles A. Beard. A Study in Anglo-American Historiography and Social Thought’, American Quarterly, xi1 (1959)Google Scholar; Toynbee, Arnold, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution (London, 1884)Google Scholar.
14 Political Science Quarterly, xxi (1906)Google Scholar.
15 U.S. Bureau of Education, Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies at the Meeting of the National Educational Association, July 9 1802 (Washington, 1893)Google Scholar.
16 The Study of History in Schools. Report to the American Historical Association of the Committee of Seven (N.Y., 1899), pp. 74–75Google Scholar.
17 Hendricks, Luther Vergil, James Harvey Robinson, Teacher of History (N.Y., 1946), pp. 53–56Google Scholar. Robinson's influence on the work of educational committees is traced on pp. 35–61.
18 Ibid., p. 63.
19 Robinson, , The New History, p. 24Google Scholar.
20 Strout, Cushing, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History. Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven, 1958), p. 17Google Scholar; Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man (London, 1871), i, p. 179Google Scholar.
21 Robinson, , The New History, pp. 17–18Google Scholar.
22 Ibid., p. 103.
23 Barnes, , History of Historical Writing, p. 376Google Scholar.
24 Robinson, , The New History, p. 239Google Scholar.
25 Hofstadter, , The Progressive Historians, p. 350Google Scholar.
26 Commager, H. S., The American Mind (N.Y., 1950), ix, p. 303Google Scholar; see Hofstadter, , op. cit., p. 350, n.2Google Scholar.
27 Parrington, , Main Currents of American Thought, i, pp. iv, vi, 62–75Google Scholar; Hofstadter, , The Progressive Historians, ch. 2, esp. at p. 398Google Scholar.
28 May, , End of American Innocence, p. 161Google Scholar.
29 Robinson, , New History, p. 47Google Scholar.
30 I depend here on Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in America: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven, 1958), p. 20Google Scholar; White, Morton G., Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (N.Y., 1947), pp. 221–222Google Scholar.
31 Hendricks, , James Harvey Robinson, p. 14Google Scholar.
32 See Barnes's, attack on ‘good taste’ as a handicap to contemporary historical writing; History of Historical Writing, p. 273Google Scholar.
33 Turner, F. J., ‘The Significance of History’, can be found, inter alia, in The Varieties of History, ed. Stern, Fritz (N.Y., 1956)Google Scholar.
34 Bradley, F. H., Presuppositions of Critical History (Oxford, 1874), p. 15Google Scholar.
35 Bury, J. B., The Idea of Progress (London, 1920)Google Scholar.
36 Becker, Carl, Everyman His Own Historian (N.Y., 1935)Google Scholar; Smith, Charlotte Watkins, Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion (Ithaca., N.Y., 1956), pp. 64, 69–76, 86Google Scholar. Wilkins, Burleigh Taylor, Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 88–89, 194–95, 198, 205Google Scholar. On Becker's debt to pragmatism, Noble, David in Ethics, lxvii (1957)Google Scholar. A distinction between evolution and progress in Becker's thoughts is suggested by Noble, David, The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis, 1958), pp. 18–33Google Scholar.
37 Smith, , op. cit., pp. 61–62Google Scholar.
38 Becker, , op. cit., p. 170Google Scholar.
39 Beard, C. A., ‘Time, Technology and the Creative Spirit in Political Science’, The American Political Science Review, xxi (02 1927)Google Scholar.
40 Beard, Charles, ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’, American Hist. Rev., xxxix (1934)Google Scholar.
41 See Barnes, , History of Historical Writing, p. 142Google Scholar.
42 The debate was continued in Beard, C. A., ‘That Noble Dream’, American Hist. Rev., xlii (1935)Google Scholar; C. A. Beard and Alfred Vagts, ‘Currents of Thought in Historiography’, ibid., xlii (1937). For a bibliography, see Hofstadter, , The Progressive Historians, p. 484Google Scholar.
43 Lamprecht, Karl, What is History? (New York and London, 1905)Google Scholar.
44 Jacobs, W. R., The World of Frederick Jackson Turner (New Haven, 1968), p. 99Google Scholar.
45 Hofstadter, , The Progressive Historians, p. 35Google Scholar; Higham, , History p. 19Google Scholar.
46 Higham, , op. cit., p. 71Google Scholar.
47 Adams, G. B.; ‘History and the Philosophy of History’, American Hist. Rev., xiv (1909)Google Scholar.
48 Hofstadter, Richard, ‘The Department of History’, in Hoxie, R. G., History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University (N.Y., 1955), p. 227Google Scholar.
49 The Study of History in Schools, pp. 167–68.
50 Cf. Beard, The Industrial Revolution; and Robinson, ‘History for the Common Man’, in The New History.
51 Commager, H. S., The Search for a Usable Past (N.Y., 1967)Google Scholar.
52 Momigliano, A. D., Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), p. 231Google Scholar.