| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David F. Ericson. The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 241. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.00.

When I think of the major American historians of the post-World War II years, names like Merrill Jensen and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth M. Stampp and C. Vann Woodward, Oscar Handlin and Richard Hofstadter come to mind. What does not come to mind is conservative "consensus" history. To concoct a consensus school, you have to iron out all of Hofstadter's subtlety, pretend that he and Louis Hartz were not profound critics of American political culture, impute far more influence to Daniel Boorstin than he ever actually had, and then close your eyes to the deeply consensual elements in the work of their radical successors, say William Appleman Williams or Eugene Genovese. It won't work. There was no consensus school of American history in the late 1940s and 1950s; there is only the myth of its prevalence. Yet that myth was potent enough that beginning in the 1960s, a long parade of historians puffed their chests in proud opposition to the intellectual misdeeds of the postwar generation and professed themselves to be shocked—shocked!—by the demon consensus. Now comes another generation, represented by David F. Ericson, a political scientist who is trapped in the historiographical mythology and determined to defend the consensus interpretation against its critics. . . .

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