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===Documentation===
===Documentation===
Archivist Elizabeth Kaplan argues the founding of a historical society begins a upward spiral with each advance legitimizing the next. Collections are gathered that support publication of documents and histories. These publications in turn give the society and its topic legitimacy and authenticity. The process creates a sense of identity and belonging.<ref>Elizabeth Kaplan, "We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity," ''American Archivist'' (2000) 63:126-51 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/40283823 in JSTOR]</ref> The builders of state historical societies and archives in the late 19th and early 20th century were more than antiquarians--they had the mission of creating as well as preserving and disseminating the collective memories of their communities.
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Revision as of 10:26, 13 January 2012

This article is part of a series on the
History of the
United States
Timeline and periods
Prehistoric and Pre-Columbian Erauntil 1607
Colonial Era 1607–1765
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    Confederation period 1783–1788
1789–1815
    Federalist Era 1788–1801
    Jeffersonian Era1801–1817
1815–1849
    Era of Good Feelings 1817–1825
    Jacksonian Era1825–1849
1849–1865
    Civil War Era 1849–1865
1865–1917
    Reconstruction Era 1865–1877
    Gilded Age 1877–1896
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    World War I 1917–1918
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1945–1964
    Post-World War II Era 1945–1964
    Civil Rights Era 1954–1968
1964–1980
    Civil Rights Era 1954–1968
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1991–2008
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2008–present
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The historiography of the United States refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to study the history of the United States. While history examines the interplay of events in the past, historiography examines how historians do this, and looks at the "methodology of historical study", according to one course description.[1]

Organizations

Historians have formed scores of scholarly organizations, which typically hold annual conferences where scholarly papers are presented, and which publish scholarly journals. In addition, every state and many localities have their own historical societies, focused on their own histories and sources.

The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest and largest society for professional historians in the U.S. Founded in 1884, it promotes historical studies covering all continents and time periods, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials. It publishes The American Historical Review five times a year, with scholarly articles and book reviews.[2]

While the AHA is the largest organization for historians working in the United States, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) is the major organization for historians who study and teach about the United States. Formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, its membership comprises college and university professors, as well as graduate students, independent historians, archivists, museum curators, and other public historians.[3] The OAH publishes the quarterly scholarly journal Journal of American History. In 2010 its individual membership was 8,000 and its institutional membership 1,250, and its operating budget was approximately $2.9 million[4]

Other large regional groups for professionals include the Southern Historical Association, founded in 1934 for white historians teaching in the South. It now chiefly specializes in the history of the South. In 1970 it elected its first black president, John Hope Franklin. The Western History Association formed in 1961 to bring together both professional scholars and amateur writers dealing with the West. Dozens of other organizations deal in specialized topics, such as the Society for Military History and the Social Science History Association.

Pre 1800

During the colonial era, there were a handful of serious scholars--most of them men of affairs who wrote about their own colony. They included Robert Beverley (1673-1722) on Virginia, Thomas Hutchinson (1711–1780) on Massachusetts, and Samuel Smith on Pennsylvania. The Loyalist Thomas Jones (1731-1792) wrote on New York from exile.[5]

1780-1860

The historiography of the Early National period focused on the American Revolution and the Constitution. The first studies came from Federalist historians, such as Chief Justice John Marshall (1755-1835). Marshall wrote a well-received four-volume of biography of George Washington that was far more than a biography, and covered the political and military history of the Revolutionary Era. Marshall emphasized Washington's virtue and military prowess. Historians have complimented his highly accurate detail, but note that Marshall--like many early historians--relied heavily on the Annual Register, edited by Edmund Burke.[6] Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) wrote her own history favored the Jeffersonian perspective stressing natural rights and equality. She emphasized the dangers to republicanism emanating from Britain, and called for the subordination of passion to reason, and the subsuming of private selfishness in the general public good.[7].

David Ramsay (1749-1815), an important Patriot leader from South Carolina, wrote thorough, scholarly histories of his state and the early United States. Trained as a physician, he was a moderate Federalist in politics. Messer (2002) examines the transition in Ramsay's republican perspective from his History of the American Revolution (1789) and his biography of Washington (1807) to his more conservative History of the United States (3 vol. 1816–17), which was part of his 12-volume world history.[8] Ramsay called on citizens to demonstrate republican virtues in helping reform and improve society. A conservative, he warned of the dangers of zealotry and the need to preserve existing institutions. O'Brien (1994) says Ramsay's 1789 History of the American Revolution was one of the earliest and most successful histories. It located American values within the European Enlightenment. Ramsay had no brief for what later was known as American exceptionalism, holding that the destiny of the new nation United States would be congruent with European political and cultural development.[9]

Hildreth

Richard Hildreth (1807 – 1865), a Yankee scholar and political writer, wrote a thorough highly precise history of the nation down to 1820. His six-volume History of the United States (1849-52) was dry and heavily factual--he rarely made a mistake in terms of names, dates, events and speeches. His Federalist views and dry style lost market share to George Bancroft's more exuberant and democratic tomes. Hildreth explicitly favored the Federalist Party and denigrated the Jeffersonians. He was an active political commentator and leading anti-slavery intellectual, so President Lincoln gave him a choice diplomatic assignment in Europe.[10]

Bancroft

George Bancroft (1800–1891), trained in the leading German universities, was a Democratic politician and accomplished scholar, whose magisterial History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent covered the new nation in depth down to 1789.[11] Bancroft was imbued with the spirit of Romanticism, emphasizing the emergence of nationalism and republican values, and rooting on every page for the Patriots. His masterwork started appearing in 1834, and he constantly revised it in numerous editions.[12] Along with John Gorham Palfrey (1796-1881), he wrote the most comprehensive history of colonial America. Billias argues Bancroft played on four recurring themes to explain how America developed its unique values: providence, progress, patria, and pan-democracy. "Providence" meant that destiny depended more on God than on human will. The idea of "progress" indicated that through continuous reform a better society was possible. "Patria" (love of country) was deserved because America's spreading influence would bring liberty and freedom to more and more of the world. "Pan-democracy" meant the nation-state was central to the drama, not specific heroes or villains..[13]

Bancroft was an indefatigable researcher who had a thorough command of the sources, but his rotund romantic style and enthusiastic patriotism annoyed later generations of scientific historians, who did not assign his books to students. Furthermore, scholars of the "Imperial School" after 1890 took a much more favorable view of the benign intentions of the British Empire than he did.[14][15]

Documentation

Archivist Elizabeth Kaplan argues the founding of a historical society begins a upward spiral with each advance legitimizing the next. Collections are gathered that support publication of documents and histories. These publications in turn give the society and its topic legitimacy and authenticity. The process creates a sense of identity and belonging.[16] The builders of state historical societies and archives in the late 19th and early 20th century were more than antiquarians--they had the mission of creating as well as preserving and disseminating the collective memories of their communities.

Add Sparks, Official Records

Civil War

Cover North (Wilson, Greeley), Neo-Confeds (Davis to Craven), memoirs (Century Magazine, Grant), Rhodes; Needless War, Freeman, Nevins, Potter, McPherson, Lincoln bios (Nicolay & Hay, to Foner).[17]

State and local history

state historical societies; archives; museums & memorials; split from scholars

Turnerian School

Main article: Frontier Thesis

The Frontier Thesis or Turner Thesis, is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the origin of the distinctive egalitarian, democratic, aggressive, and innovative features of the American character has been the American frontier experience. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. In the thesis, the frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mind-sets and ending prior customs of the 19th century.[18] The Turner thesis came under attack from the "New Western Historians" after 1970 who wanted to limit western history to the western states, with a special emphasis on the 20th century, women and minorities.[19]

Beardian School

The Beardians were led by Charles A. Beard, who wrote a book called An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, and his wife Mary Ritter Beard. Whereas Turnerians tended to believe in geographic determinism, Beardians tended to believe in economic determinism, seeing events as the product of the clash of economic forces.

Charles A. Beard (1874-1948) published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science. His works included radical re-evaluation of the founding fathers of the United States, who he believed were motivated more by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, written with his wife Mary Beard, was the wide-ranging and bestselling The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which had a major influence on American historians.[20]

Beard was famous as a political liberal, but he strenuously opposed American entry into World War II, for which he blamed Franklin D. Roosevelt more than Japan or Germany. This stance destroyed his career,[21] as his fellow scholars repudiated his foreign policy and dropped his materialistic model of class conflict. Richard Hofstadter concluded in 1968: "Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival."[22]


Slavery

The historian Peter Kolchin, writing in 1993, noted that until recently historians of slavery concentrated more on the behavior of slaveholders than on slaves. Part of this was related to the fact that most slaveholders were literate and able to leave behind a written record of their perspective. Most slaves were illiterate and unable to create a written record. There were differences among scholars as to whether slavery should be considered a benign or a “harshly exploitive” institution.[23]

Kolchin described the state of historiography in the early 20th century as follows:

During the first half of the twentieth century, a major component of this approach was often simply racism, manifest in the belief that blacks were, at best, imitative of whites. Thus Ulrich B. Phillips, the era's most celebrated and influential expert on slavery, combined a sophisticated portrait of the white planters' life and behavior with crude passing generalizations about the life and behavior of their black slaves.[23]

Historians James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton described Phillips' mindset, methodology and influence:

His portrayal of blacks as passive, inferior people, whose African origins made them uncivilized, seemed to provide historical evidence for the theories of racial inferiority that supported racial segregation. Drawing evidence exclusively from plantation records, letters, southern newspapers, and other sources reflecting the slaveholder's point of view, Phillips depicted slave masters who provided for the welfare of their slaves and contended that true affection existed between master and slave.[24]

The racist attitude concerning slaves carried over into the historiography of the Dunning School of Reconstruction era history, which dominated in the early 20th century. Writing in 2005, the historian Eric Foner states:

Their account of the era rested, as one member of the Dunning school put it, on the assumption of “negro incapacity.” Finding it impossible to believe that blacks could ever be independent actors on the stage of history, with their own aspirations and motivations, Dunning et al. portrayed African Americans either as “children”, ignorant dupes manipulated by unscrupulous whites, or as savages, their primal passions unleashed by the end of slavery.[25]

Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, historiography moved away from the “overt” racism of the Phillips era. Historians still emphasized the slave as an object. Whereas Phillips presented the slave as the object of benign attention by the owners, historians such as Kenneth Stampp emphasized the mistreatment and abuse of the slave.[26]

In the portrayal of the slave as victim, the historian Stanley M. Elkins in his 1959 work “Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life” compared the effects of United States slavery to that resulting from the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps. He stated the institution destroyed the will of the slave, creating an “emasculated, docile Sambo” who identified totally with the owner. Elkins' thesis was challenged by historians. Gradually historians recognized that in addition to the effects of the owner-slave relationship, slaves did not live in a “totally closed environment but rather in one that permitted the emergence of enormous variety and allowed slaves to pursue important relationships with persons other than their master, including those to be found in their families, churches and communities.”[citation needed]

Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman in the 1970s, through their work Time on the Cross, portrayed slaves as having internalized the Protestant work ethic of their owners.[27] In portraying the more benign version of slavery, they also argue in their 1974 book that the material conditions under which the slaves lived and worked compared favorably to those of free workers in the agriculture and industry of the time. (This was also an argument of Southerners during the 19th century.)

In the 1970s and 1980s, historians made use of archaeological records, black folklore, and statistical data to describe a much more detailed and nuanced picture of slave life. Relying also on 19th-century autobiographies of ex-slaves (known as slave narratives) and the interviews conducted with former slave interviews in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, historians described slavery as the slaves experienced it. Far from slaves' being strictly victims or content, historians showed slaves as both resilient and autonomous in many of their activities. Despite their exercise of autonomy and their efforts to make a life within slavery, current historians recognize the precariousness of the slave's situation. Slave children quickly learned that they were subject to the direction of both their parents and their owners. They saw their parents disciplined just as they came to realize that they also could be physically or verbally abused by their owners. Historians writing during this era include John Blassingame (Slave Community), Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll), Leslie Howard Owens (This Species of Property), and Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom).[28]

Important work on slavery has continued; for instance, in 2003 Steven Hahn published the Pulitzer Prize-winning account, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, which examined how slaves built community and political understanding while enslaved, so they quickly began to form new associations and institutions when emancipated, including black churches separate from white control. In 2010, Robert E. Wright published a model that explains why slavery was more prevalent in some areas than others (e.g. southern than northern Delaware) and why some firms (individuals, corporations, plantation owners) chose slave labor while others used wage, indentured, or family labor instead.[29]

Postwar era

During the 1960s and 1970s, historians started to be less interested on "great man" history, and more on social and cultural history. One of the more influential books in American social and cultural history was A People's History of the United States by the historian Howard Zinn. This reflected the disaffection many Americans felt after such events as the Vietnam War and Watergate.

Social history

Social history, often called the new social history, is the history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. It includes topics like demography, women, family, and education. It was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments. In two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%.[30]

The Social Science History Association, formed in 1976, brings together scholars from numerous disciplines interested in social history and publishes Social Science History quarterly.[31] The field is also the specialty of the Journal of Social History, edited since 1967 by Peter Stearns[32] It covers such topics as gender relations; race in American history; the history of personal relationships; consumerism; sexuality; the social history of politics; crime and punishment, and history of the senses. Most of the major historical journals have coverage as well.

However, after 1990 social history was increasingly challenged by cultural history, which emphasizes language and the importance of beliefs and assumptions and their causal role in group behavior.[33]

Prominent historians working in the U.S.

Historians born before 1900

Historians born in 20th century

American historians working in U.S. on non-U.S. topics

---

Notes and references

  1. ^ Donna Gebbacia, Ellen Manthe (February 12, 1999). "United States Immigration History and Historiography". Course notes. Retrieved 2011-01-15. Historiography is the methodology of historical study. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  2. ^ James J. Sheehan, "The AHA and its Publics - Part I." Perspectives 2005 43(2): 5-7. online
  3. ^ Kirkendall, ed. (2011)
  4. ^ "OAH Treasurer’s Report, Fiscal Year, 2009", Robert Griffith, OAH Treasurer, February 8, 2010 http://www.oah.org/publications/reports/treasurer09.pdf
  5. ^ Michael Kraus and Davis D. Joyce, The Writing of American History (3rd ed. 1990) ch 3-4
  6. ^ William A. Foran, "John Marshall as a Historian," American Historical Review 43#1 (1937), pp. 51-64 in JSTOR
  7. ^ Lawrence J. Friedman and Arthur H. Shaffer, "Mercy Otis Warren and the Politics of Historical Nationalism," New England Quarterly 48#2 (1975), pp. 194-215 in JSTOR
  8. ^ Peter C. Messer, "From a Revolutionary History to a History of Revolution: David Ramsay and the American Revolution," Journal of the Early Republic 2002 22(2): 205-233. Jstor
  9. ^ Karen O'Brien, "David Ramsay and the Delayed Americanization of American History." Early American Literature 1994 29(1): 1-18. ISSN: 0012-8163
  10. ^ Harvey Wish, The American Historian: A Social-intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (1960) ch 4 online
  11. ^ Harvey Wish, The American Historian: A Social-intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (1960) ch 5 online
  12. ^ See for online editions
  13. ^ George Athan Billias, "George Bancroft: Master Historian," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Oct 2001, 111#2 pp 507-528
  14. ^ N. H. Dawes, and F. T. Nichols, "Revaluing George Bancroft," New England Quarterly, 6#2 (1933), pp. 278-293 in JSTOR
  15. ^ Michael Kraus, "George Bancroft 1834-1934," New England Quarterly, 7#4 (1934), pp. 662-686 in JSTOR
  16. ^ Elizabeth Kaplan, "We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity," American Archivist (2000) 63:126-51 in JSTOR
  17. ^ Thomas Pressley, Americans interpret their Civil War (1954)
  18. ^ Ray Allen Billington, ed,. The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (1966)
  19. ^ Clyde A. Milner, et al. Trails: Toward a New Western History (1991)
  20. ^ Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (1983).
  21. ^ Burris, Charles (2007-08-01) Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide, LewRockwell.com
  22. ^ Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (1968), 344
  23. ^ a b Kolchin p. 134
  24. ^ Horton and Horton, p. 9. David and Temin (p. 740) add, "The considerable scholarship of Phillips and his followers was devoted to rehabilitating the progressive image of white supremacist society in the antebellum South; it provided a generally sympathetic and sometimes blatantly apologetic portrayal of slaveholders as a paternalistic breed of men."
  25. ^ Foner 2005 p. xxii
  26. ^ Kolchin p. 135. David and Temin p. 741. The latter authors wrote, “The vantage point correspondingly shifted from that of the master to that of his slave. The reversal culminated in Kenneth M. Stampp's ‘The Peculiar Institution’ (1956), which rejected both the characterization of blacks as a biologically and culturally inferior, childlike people, and the depiction of the white planters as paternal Cavaliers coping with a vexing social problem that was not of their own making.”
  27. ^ Kolchin p. 136
  28. ^ Kolchin pp. 137–143. Horton and Horton p. 9
  29. ^ Robert E. Wright, Fubarnomics (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2010), 83-116.
  30. ^ Diplomatic dropped from 5% to 3%, economic history from 7% to 5%, and cultural history grew from 14% to 16%. Based on full-time professors in U.S. history departments. Stephen H. Haber, David M. Kennedy, and Stephen D. Krasner, "Brothers under the Skin: Diplomatic History and International Relations," International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1997), pp. 34-43 at p. 4 2; online at JSTOR
  31. ^ See the SSHA website
  32. ^ . See Journal of Social History
  33. ^ Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999).

Further reading

  • Handlin, Oscar, et al. Harvard guide to American history (1955), methods and bibliographies
  • Higham, John. History: Professional Scholarship in America (1989). ISBN 0-8018-3952-1
  • Kirkendall, Richard S., ed. The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History (2011), essays on the history of the OAH, and on teaching main themes
  • Kraus, Michael,and Davis D. Joyce, The Writing of American History (3rd ed. 1990)
  • Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (1988), ISBN 0-521-34328-3
  • Parish, Peter J., ed. Reader's Guide to American History (1997), historiographical overview of 600 topics
  • Rutland, Robert, ed. Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000 (University of Missouri Press, 2000) online
  • Wish, Harvey. The American Historian: A Social-intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (Oxford University Press, 1960) online
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