| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. By Paul A. Gilje. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xiv, 344 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8122-3756-0.)

The notion that from time to time the past must be rewritten to conform to the present first attained academic legitimacy when Carl Becker gave it his imprimatur in a 1931 presidential address to the American Historical Association.

It should be a relief to us to renounce omniscience, to recognize that every generation, our own included, will, must inevitably, understand the past ... in the light of its own restricted experience. (American Historical Review, Jan. 1932, p. 235)

Over seventy years later, his message on the malleability of history still causes historians to cringe despite the measure of truth it contains. Yet if watching the periodic reordering of the past is one of Becker's rewards in the next world, Paul A. Gilje's book surely will put him in a fine frame of mind.

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