Book Review

Methods/Theory

Because it is impossible to offer any thoughtful evaluation of a great many separate essays on a variety of topics, volumes of this kind are ordinarily relegated to the "Collected Essays" section, where their tables of contents tell readers of the AHR something of their scope. (In fact, collections like this one, most of whose contributions have previously been published elsewhere, are rarely noted.) But this is not an ordinary volume, and it is most usefully considered as a primary document. Although the two dozen essays take up a variety of topics, overall the book constitutes the Declaration of Independence of the new Historical Society from what it regards as a corrupt and tyrannical historical establishment. Much of this declaration, like its eighteenth-century predecessor, is devoted to detailing the "long train of abuses and usurpations," evincing "a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism," which have led the men and women of the new society to "dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another."	1
Eugene Genovese, the founding president of the Historical Society, recently told an audience of scholars that the American Historical Association (AHA) is "in the hands of people who . . . are committed to the myth of America as a uniquely evil nation . . . [T]hey recruit the like-minded while they purge dissenters or . . . make sure dissenters never get jobs in the first place." It is an error, he said, to think that these are "decent people who are just not thinking straight. Decent people do not do what they do." He informs readers that the "presiding cliques" of the profession have created "an atmosphere that uncomfortably resembles the McCarthyism of the 1950s"; they have made ideological conformity the primary criterion for holding office" in "establishment organizations." Editors Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, in their introduction to the book under review, report wide agreement in the historical profession that students should not be asked to "learn anything about those of whom they did not approve." Traditional fields of history, they say, "are now widely derided as the preserves of elite white men who trod upon the sensibilities and aspirations of those less privileged than they." The American historical profession, as presented in this volume, is one in which tolerance, mutual respect, and cooperation have given way to the tyranny of "politically correct" ideologues who shamelessly bend the past to suit their politics.	2
It is easy to deride and tempting to dismiss this overwrought version of the current scene. But it is more useful to glance at some of the far-reaching changes in the American historical profession over the past twenty-five years to which the book is an exaggerated response. Those now in their sixties and seventies came of age at a time when the approved posture for academics was one of ironic detachment. Not surprisingly, many of them were discomfited when this stance gave way to an ethos of passionate commitment. Those old enough to have entered the profession when history was overwhelmingly empiricist and atheoretical have often been bewildered and made cranky by the metastasizing of theory within the discipline in recent decades. Crankiness is compounded among those in fields like diplomatic or military history, whose standing within the discipline has declined relative to that of women's history and varieties of ethnic history. Then there is politics. Over recent decades, while the center of gravity of the American polity has moved markedly to the right, the historical profession has lurched sharply to the left. Historians who have moved rightward (or even stood still) have come to feel isolated and marginalized in a profession that is often at odds with "mainstream" American opinion.	. . .