The Problem of Fragmentation and the Prospects for Synthesis in Early American Social History

A LTHOUGH anyone who has looked for an academic job in the last two decades might justifiably dispute the assertion, let us begin frankly: there has never been a better time than the present to be an early American historian. The last half of the twentieth century in general, the last quarter in particular, has been a time of demographic transformation and intellectual vitality unparalleled in the history of our field. No single development bears more responsibility for this than the rise of what was, just a couple of decades ago, a social Scholars such as Carl Bridenbaugh and Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, of course, wrote social history long before I970. The publication in that year of four extraordinary books, however, made it clear that a new approach to the field had been born-one informed by theoretical insights, interdisciplinary in approach, and self-conscious in methodology.' Since then, the field has come to embrace such a multitude of topics and methods that today we have no trouble identifying as social history projects that range from the study of gender roles to the analysis of diet or the impact of climate on culture. In view of social history's great diversity, perhaps the most reliable generalization one can make about it is the claim many of its practitioners proudly staked circa I970-that in concerns, emphases, and objects, social history is the antithesis of traditional history. At the time this claim was first made, it seemed bolder and more confrontational than it does now, for although social history has never lacked critics, their numbers are steadily, and perhaps irreversibly, declin

Fragmentation (computing · Political science · American History and Culture · Computer Science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History

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