| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods and Theory

Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog, editors. American Public Life and the Historical Imagination. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 308. Cloth $45.00, paper $20.00.

A festschrift for Morton Keller, written by his former students, this volume seeks to establish "public life" as a standard category in American history. The phrase, they believe, best captures formal politics as well as the arena in which government and the people interact. Like their mentor, the contributors are skeptical of social scientists' faith that a methodology or conceptual category legitimates broad generalizations across temporal and spatial boundaries. The public history advanced here eschews theoretical abstractions and sweeping periodization and embraces variety, contradiction, contingency, and context embedded in "small narratives" at the intersection of change and continuity.

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