American Literature in American History

Bert James Loewenberg, American History in American Thought: Christopher Columbus to Henry Adams. Simon and Schuster, 1972. $14.95. 731 pp. F. Garvin Davenport, Jr., The Myth of Southern History: Historical Consciousness in Twentieth- Century Southern Literature. Vanderbilt University Press, 1970. $7.95. ix + 212 pp. American History in American Thought is the immensely learned first volume in a promised - and surely prodigious - four-volume survey of American historiography. Its declared purpose is "to trace the develop- ment of historical scholarship in the United States from the European sources of its origin until yesterday" In practice, as the sub-title indicates, "yesterday" means the end of the nineteenth century; twentieth-century, including contemporary, developments in history will be covered, together with much else, in subsequent volumes. At one level the book is a straight- forward contribution to historiography, a kind of bibliography of signi- ficant historical writing annotated with great richness and discrimination and handled discursively in twenty-six extended chapters, beginning with "The New World Before Columbus'" and ending on a high note with a deeply appreciative discussion of Henry Adams - whose History of the United States of America is acclaimed as "unrivaled, the best single piece of literary craftsmanship in American historiography." But Professor Loewenberg is also deliberately, and successfully, seeking to make a con- tribution to the history of ideas, exploring in particular the cultural signi- ficance of scholarship, the transatlantic (and especially German) sources of much scholarly and pedagogical methodology, and the transmission of both methodology and inspiration through the medium of particular in- dividuals and institutions

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