Consensus Revisited

Major L. Wilson, Space, Time and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815-1861. Westport, Conri.: Greenwood Press, 1974. 309 pp. Ruch Welter, The Mind of America 1820-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. 603 pp. Consensus historians have faced two sets of particularly burdensome difficulties in the course of their efforts to unify the elements of the American experience. In the face of much - sectional differences, ethnic identification, even class con- sciousness - that might have been expected to mitigate the sense of a common participation in a shared national experience, they have had to argue the proposi- tion that Americans inhabited the same universe of belief and value. Secondly, they have had to decide whether this universe, once identified, was an historical product which assumed form and definition over time, or whether it was in possession of its essential characteristics throughout the course of American history.1

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