History's Memory: Writing Americas Past, 1880-1980

Fitzpatrick, associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, surveys American historical writing of the past century. The author stands in contradiction to the received opinions of the historical community several decades back that, e.g., the revisionist historians gravitating around William Appleman Williams represented a clean break with the "consensus historians" of the immediate post-World War II years. Instead, she finds much more in common between the current crop of Braudel-like "bottom-up" historians and, say, the progressives of the earlier part of the century, whom many radicals consider anathema. That is, recent works by such historians as Stephan Thernstrom and Sam Bass Warner, while perhaps able to take advantage of more sophisticated research techniques and tools, harken back to contemporaries of Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner, such as Carter Woodson and W. E. B. DuBois, who didn't swallow American "exceptionalism" hook, line, and sinker. Fitzpatrick urges younger historians not to jettison the influence of America's historical heritage in an effort to be "relevant." Allen Weakland