The 3/1938 number of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung includes a review in German by F.N. Howard of several contemporary histories in which he discusses three major trends over time in American historical writing.
One he describes as history-writing with "an outspoken epical character," which was dominant from roughly 1825-1875. He gives as examples George Bancroft (1800-91), Francis Parkman (1823-93), William Prescott (1796-1859) and John Lothrop Motley (1814-77). "History was the medium," he writes, "through which they enunciated their social and political philosophy." They wrote in an epic style about big events like the American Revolution and the conquest of Mexico and Peru. "They engaged monarchy, slavery, mercantilism." And they depicted the course of American history as "a path to freedom and happiness blessed by God."
And their taking of positions on certain issues was "open and clear." For instance, the "fight of the Puritans against the despotism of the Tudors and Stuarts." These historians and their approaches had their drawbacks. "Their scholarship was often not that great, their categories not all that exact, their judgments were often determined by particular interests."
During the last quarter of the 19th century and through the First World War or so, historians like John Fiske (1842-1901) and James Ford Rhodes (1848-1927) challenged this optimistic view. The result wasn’t a more progressive outlook. "The American Revolution loses its heroic qualities and became almost a gentleman's affair. Democracy, freedom, equality remain magical words; but their content became more and more non-specific." They also tended "to lose themselves in endless details of diplomatic, military and political histories." He gives credit to Henry Adams (1838-1918), James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936), Charles Beard (1874-1948) and Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) for bringing in more progressive perspectives and social history. But Howard argues that their progressive influence was limited.
Howard characterizes the period from around the First World War to the time he was writing (1938) as one in which a nominally non-partisan and value-free specialization dominated American history writing. "The times of the dramatic and didactic history writing about men who had actively taken part in the political and ideological fight are over. ... The writer of history has become a specialist.” This type of historian "fetishizes his nonpartisanship." They use a positivist methodology and avoid sweeping historical narrative. Consistent with the general Frankfurt School criticism of positivism and a supposedly value-free perspective, he argues that such historians fail to do what he argues is the most decisive thing for history writing: "by their ability to reconstruct the social reality in its dynamics."
But, as he points out, partisanship can hide behind this positivist nonpartisanship. He observes, "The history writers of the 19th century were all bitter opponents of slavery." He overstates the case here, because slavery apologists had their own spokespeople, though none of them rose to the stature of a Francis Parkman. "Now historians like Ulrich Bonnell Phillips [1877-1934] and his students are now undertaking to show the slaves, after the first violent deeds had finally been overcome [apparently meaning the slave trade] for the most part actually not treated badly."
He concludes by noting that, fortunately, there were opposing trends in history-writing in America at that time.
Tags: f n howard,frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, us history
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