| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gerald L. Fetner. Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 243. $45.00.

Why is this the first biography of Allan Nevins, who was born in 1890 and died in 1971? I ask because Nevins was a towering figure in the history profession from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was the author of thirty-three books, two of which were awarded Pulitzer Prizes. He was the coauthor of six books and edited seventeen books. He was the editor of the "American Political Leaders" series. He wrote countless editorials for newspapers and was the founder of American Heritage magazine. Why, then, has he been so ignored by professional historians since his death? The major answer provided by Gerald L. Fetner is that the history profession turned, in the 1950s, away from Nevins's commitment to narrative history. He uses Richard Hofstadter, a young colleague of Nevins at Columbia University in the 1950s, as an exemplar of a generational revolution. The younger generation, according to Fetner, looked to the social sciences for inspiration in the analysis of social and cultural patterns, as in Hofstadter's use of the concept of status revolution in The Age of Reform (1955).

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