| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880–1980. By Ellen Fitzpatrick. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. xiv, 318 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-00731-X.)

In 1900 the American Historical Association (AHA) honored Edward Eggleston as its president. In a presidential address he was unable to deliver due to the illness that killed him, Eggleston predicted,	1
History will be better written in the ages to come. The soldier will not take the place he has taken. I do not say that the drum and trumpet history will have gone out, but when the American Historical Association shall assemble in the closing week a hundred years hence, there will be, do not doubt it, gifted writers of the history of the people.... We shall have the history of culture, the real history of men and women. (p. 13)
In History's Memory, Ellen Fitzpatrick recovers the forgotten voices of many historians who pioneered the study of Indians and immigrants, slaves and indentured servants, farm families and mill workers, the men and women whose stories constitute our history.	2
Why do few historians today read Eggleston's The Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century (1900), Ellen Churchill Semple's American History and Its Geographic Conditions (1903), or Angie Debo's The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (1934)? According to Fitzpatrick, our cartoon version of "consensus history" is to blame. Conjured up in 1959 by John Higham to warn against replacing America's real diversity and intense conflict with a "placid, unexciting past" (p. 189), the notion of consensus history quickly morphed into a monster. Obsession with books such as David Potter's People of Plenty (1954), Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), and Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955) obscured earlier work on Indians, blacks, women, and immigrants. In the 1960s and 1970s, the "new social historians" claimed such topics as their own. Most historians today—avid readers and teachers of The New American History (1990), a quasi-official collection sponsored by the AHA—share their commitments. But, as Fitzpatrick demonstrates, what has been happening since the 1960s is nothing new.	3
American historians' interest in ordinary people is as old as the profession itself. J. Franklin Jameson, awarded the first Ph.D. in history at Johns Hopkins University and the first editor of the American Historical Review, wrote his first seminar paper in 1880 on a slave revolt in Barbados. In 1885, Jameson insisted that "the history of a democracy ought not to be an Iliad." Instead, American historians must dig into "the masses of county and town and court records, and what of private correspondence has been preserved, and leave no stone unturned in the effort to reproduce exhaustively the course of democracy in our country" (p. 23). Many scholars took his advice. Amateurs such as John Bach McMaster and Alice Earle were joined by professionals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who studied the slave trade; James Harvey Robinson, whose essay collection The New History (1912) merely codified what was happening; and Frederick Jackson Turner, who in 1923 recommended doing history "from the bottom up" (p. 49). Traditionalists today might sympathize with George Burton Adams, who lamented in his AHA presidential address the incursion of theories drawn from outside history and urged historians to keep studying politics and war: "our methods, our results and our ideals are assailed, and we are being thrown upon the defensive at many points" (p. 65). The date was 1908. From the same bully pulpit in 1912, AHA president Theodore Roosevelt reminded historians of the "literary power" of narrative and warned against the lure of science and abstractions. Although TR worried about "the drab monotony of the ordinary," he conceded that American historians must "paint for us the life of the plain people, the ordinary men and women" (p. 87).	. . .

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