An Investigation of the Inarticulate

Philadelphia's White Oaks

Bibliographic Data

ID3482814
AuthorsJ Hutson (0000-0002-0578-6052, corresponding author), James H Hutson
Year1971
Volume28
Issue1
Pages3
Publication date1971-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1925117
OpenAlexW2320059492
LanguageEN
Citations received9

IT is a truism that the literature of American history has always reflected, to some degree, the times in which it was written. To illustrate this point, the impact of Populism and Progressivism on historical writing is usually cited. These movements produced class and sectional conflict in American society; historians writing in their midst discovered class and sectional conflict in American history. The Constitution was portrayed as the covenant of an economic class; the Revolution was pictured as triggering a struggle for supremacy in American society between west and east, rich and poor. Historians writing during the I940s and I950S -drastically revised this scenario, but of course theirs was a drastically different world, the era of World War II and the Cold War, a time when the United States was constantly threatened by powerful foreign enemies. These external challenges produced a high degree of cohesion in the country, which historians (so their later critics alleged) began identifying as the chief characteristic of early American society. The people of the American colonies, according to the so-called consensus historians of the I940s and I950S, were distinguished more by their similarities than by their differences; they agreed about the fundamental objectives of colonial society, they shared the same ideals and aspirations, and most of them occupied the same middle rung on the socio-economic ladder. The historians of this era reexamined the Constitution and found it to be less a class compact than it had formerly been considered, and they tended to see the Revolution as a contest for home rule rather than a conflict over who should rule at home. Looking at the present period, one would not hesitate to predict the kind of history it would produce. We are living in one of the most divisive decades in American history, a time of conflict between races, classes, and age groups. Therefore, what is surprising is not that historians are

Biology · Political science · White (mutation · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Medicine · Race, History, and American Society · Gerontology

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