Book Review

Methods/Theory

Twenty years have passed since the last panel of prominent historians reported on the current state of American scholarship in their respective fields in The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, edited by Michael Kammen (1980). Then, specialization was anxiously noticed; the virtual absence of new books able to command general attention was sobering. On the whole, however, the judgments of this earlier inquest were proudly upbeat, as one might expect from a report sponsored by the American Historical Association (AHA) and intended for presentation to the International Congress of Historical Sciences.	1
Now, a second broadly analytical survey comes before us, examining about eighteen fields of history that American scholars cultivate. This new enterprise is similarly structured, with European history in one large section and American history in another. But it departs strikingly from its predecessor in content and spirit. First, by sponsorship and direction: this collection arose not from a celebratory occasion but from repeated consultations that a small group of scholars at Brown University, led by Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, carried out. Prospective contributors were charged with uncovering the conventions, assumptions, and convictions that shaped the rise and led to the present state of their respective fields. Individual authors could establish their own starting points. Nevertheless, a preliminary conference to share their various plans; then a week-long immersion in the relative isolation of San Marino, with sixteen European scholars present as critics; and, finally, further revisions of the conference papers—all produced a substantial convergence among the essays without obliterating important distinctions between fields and authors.	2
A second departure has to do with the volume's interpretive depth. Almost all of the essays reach back to the beginning of the American historical profession, and some much farther. This long time span—contrasting with the focus of the AHA volume on the 1960s and 1970s—in itself compelled attention to major shifts of interpretation. Additionally, the editors' framework and the critical responses the authors encountered in colloquies with European critics and with one another induced them to take considerable notice not only of major changes in the American context but also of how their praxis absorbed, resisted, or simply differed from similar scholarly projects in other countries. This is not the usual collection of disconnected essays gathered under some hopeful rubric. On the other hand, the strong editorial direction and the broad consensus it elicited may have tended to muffle some dissent.	3
The leitmotif of the book, which a brief review must grossly schematize, is the deep rupture that opened in the 1960s in nearly all fields of history between an older historiography of politics, intellect, and progress and a new historiography of society, culture, and disconnection. The old historiography relished national distinctions; the new historiography melts boundaries and continuities in a great kaleidoscope of transnational appearances. The former perspective fixed on centers; the latter inhabits peripheries.	4
The first essay, a thematic overview by Daniel T. Rodgers, traces with a mixture of shrewd analysis and explosive rhetoric the rise and fall among historians of ideas of American "exceptionalism." Once unquestioned, drawing "on wells of pride as deep as those of anxiety," then qualified among early professionals by transatlantic sympathies, American exceptionalism was finally either aggressively argued or unconsciously revealed in the nation's recoil after World War II from a revolutionary world. Only since the 1980s, as stability returned to Europe and Asia, has a scholarly vanguard overcome "a yearning for proof of [American] uniqueness so deep that it tied every other nation's history in fetters" (pp. 21, 24).	. . .