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Forum: Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform after Fifty Years
[Note: The following two essays are revised versions of presentations made by Robert Johnston and Gillis Harp at the annual meeting of the British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH) in Cambridge, England, in October 2005. BrANCH invited SHGAPE to help organize the conference. Based on a suggestion by Robert Johnston, SHGAPE contributed a session commemorating Richard Hofstadter's book on the Populist and Progressive movements, first published in 1955 and much-acclaimed and much-criticized since. While Professor Johnston had the assignment of assessing The Age of Reform in retrospect, Gillis Harp attempted to put the book within its contemporary intellectual context. Beyond evaluating this noteworthy book, the session had the intention as well of prompting memories from a few people in attendance who knew Hofstadter as a friend and colleague. In this, the session succeeded, reminding those present that The Age of Reform reflected the personality of its author and is more than a historiographic interpretation against which one measures one's own views.]
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The Age of Reform: A Defense of Richard Hofstadter Fifty Years On1
Robert D. Johnston, University of Illinois at Chicago
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When we attend academic history conferences, it has become common to hold sessions honoring important books of the moment. This makes considerable sense, as authors get to engage with thoughtful critics in a process that, we hope, advances the discipline. |
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What, then, might be the point of holding a session in honor of a book published long ago—indeed, one as ancient as fifty years old? The minimalist reason might be that we are historians, and so we naturally look to the past for interest and inspiration. That would make sense, except that historians, ironically more than scholars in related disciplines, tend to cannibalize their predecessors. Sociologists, of course, still actively engage Weber, Durkheim and Marx, and even—looking to the American midcentury—Richard Hofstadter's Columbia University colleagues, C. Wright Mills and Robert Merton. |
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Yet who are the comparable figures for the historical profession? Thucydides? I actually taught The History of the Peloponnesian War a fair amount recently in my course introducing new graduate students to the historical profession, but I'm not quite sure the Athenian general counts as our near contemporary. Braudel, perhaps? Alas, few Americanists these days possess the long duration necessary to read his books. A better candidate is E. P. Thompson, certainly one of my heroes, whose first major work, a biography of William Morris, coincidentally also appeared the same year as the book that will serve as the focus of this essay. Alas, who—at least on our side of the Atlantic—today reads more than the preface to The Making of the English Working Class? Add to our lack of recognized great ancestors the increasingly trendy denigration of historiographical discussion—DO NOT DISCUSS OTHER SCHOLARS IN THE TEXT, ONLY IN THE FOOTNOTES, AND ONLY THEN IF YOU REALLY HAVE TO, says the hip graduate advisor to her Ph.D. students—and we are increasingly cultivating a historical discipline blind to its own past. |
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Assuming that my kind audience shares an opposition to this kind of self-imposed amnesia, let me offer other possible answers to the question of why we might want to revisit an old book. We might say that such a text is more useful as a primary source rather than as a secondary source, that it provides an excellent window into the temper of its times. Or, because we now write much less gracefully than did the oldsters, we might get a few tips for refining our prose from the Parkmans, Prescotts, or even Potters of our profession. Of course, there is always the most satisfying reason to dig a fifty-year-old book out of the archeological trash pit: to prove it utterly wrong and thereby demonstrate our own enlightenment! |
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