History's Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880-1980 - Hardcover

Fitzpatrick, Ellen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067400731X ISBN 13: 9780674007314

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Enthusiasts and critics both have looked to the political upheavals of the 1960s to explain recent transformations in historical study. But how new, in fact, are our contemporary approaches to the study and writing of American history? This question lies at the heart of History's Memory, Ellen Fitzpatrick's sweeping study of the past century of American historical writing.

Through careful examination of hundreds of historical essays and books, Fitzpatrick has uncovered striking continuities in the writing of American history. The contributions of earlier scholars, some of them outside the mainstream of the historical profession, reveal that interest in the history of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class has been long-standing. Whether in the Progressive era's attention to issues of class, or in the renewed concern with Native Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that over the past century historians have frequently grappled with issues that we think of today as innovative.

This reinterpretation of a century of American historical writing challenges the notion that the politics of the recent past alone explains the politics of history. Fitzpatrick offers a wise historical perspective on today's heated debates, and reclaims the long line of historians who tilled the rich and diverse soil of our past.

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of History, Harvard University, and the author of Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform.

Reviews

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/pdf/FITHIS_excerpt.pdf

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067400731X
• ISBN 13: 9780674007314
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336