Clio's Favorites: Leading historians of the United States, 1945-2000

Superheroes of the Historical Profession

Clio's Favorites: Leading historians of the United States, 1945-2000

A panel of twenty-five historians picked the best scholars of American history since 1945. Thirteen made the grade. For each of these thirteen, a historian with a relevant background was commissioned to write an essay describing his or her life and career. The University of Missouri Press then made the virtuous decision to publish this work with footnotes. The result is Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000. Such a book is unlikely to ever top the bestseller lists (with or without footnotes), but it is an irresistible read for anyone fascinated by the careers of great historians. Robert Allen Rutland, the editor of this collection, notes that the biographical essay for one of the selected historians did not arrive in time to meet the publication deadline. All those who feel that they should have been included in this list of superstars can console themselves with the thought that they were probably the thirteenth historian.

Although limited to an examination of the careers of elite historians, this book provides insight into the growth and development of the American historical profession more generally. One receives the impression that institutional loyalty was stronger a half-century ago. Famous historians seem to have switched employers less often than they do now. The essays also provide a sense of the extent to which a small number of schools--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Columbia--dominated the field of American history during the years before the GI Bill. Looking back, that world seems small and intimate. Historians, if they were industrious, could read every major work of scholarship that dealt with their broad area of specialization. For example, one could conceivably gain mastery over the most important research in the fields of colonial America or the antebellum era.

The years after the Second World War witnessed significant expansion in the size and funding of the American historical profession. The individuals described in these essays took full advantage of this trend. They worked to establish new fields of inquiry, many of them paying careful attention to the lives and influence of previously neglected groups. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that anyone would now seek to narrate the course of American history while ignoring the activities of women and African-Americans. Most young historians take this for granted. Yet this more expansive notion of history resulted in part from the trailblazing efforts of teachers such as John Hope Franklin, a scholar of American race relations, and Gerda Lerner, a vigorous proponent of women's history. At the same time, hiring practices slowly evolved. The biographical portraits in this book provide evidence of the struggles waged by Jews, women, and African-Americans as they sought positions in America's most esteemed universities. From the standpoint of the historical profession, the progress made in opening the field to a wider diversity of talents will undoubtedly be seen as one of the most significant trends of the post-1945 era.

Focusing on the most successful scholars of American history, this book simultaneously illuminates some of the weaknesses of the profession. Historians tend to be nationalistic in their research interests, most focusing their expertise on a single country. Historians who study their own nation--especially when it is as large and self-absorbed as the United States--tend to be parochial. Such solipsism is unfortunate since the ability to compare the United States to other societies facilitates efforts to zero in on questions of underlying causation in American history. Many of the scholars described in these essays have been leading practitioners of cross-national comparison, which has provided useful perspective on their own areas of specialization. Consider C. Vann Woodward's grasp of Southern history, Howard Lamar's revision of myths about the Western frontier, Gerda Lerner's examination of American women, and Bernard Bailyn's insights into the origins of the American Revolution: all benefited greatly from a willingness to look for answers beyond the United States.
I initially found the inclusion of Arthur Link the most surprising selection in the list. Most of Link's research centered on a single individual, Woodrow Wilson. This is a remarkably narrow compass upon which to found a major reputation. Link's scholarly output, although impressive in terms of both quality and quantity, did not directly shape the historiography of his field to the same extent as did most of the other historians included in this book. Yet John Milton Cooper's splendid essay about Link (marred only by a lack of footnotes) convinced me to revise my opinion. Link's oversight of the project to publish the papers of Wilson, which eventually amounted to sixty-nine volumes, demonstrated that such enterprises can be accomplished with remarkable dispatch (less than thirty years) while maintaining the highest standards of scholarship. All historians who have conducted significant research on the early twentieth century are in his debt. Link is truly a historian's historian.

The authors of these biographical portraits have generally known their subjects personally, either as teachers or colleagues. This proximity proves to be both an advantage and a disadvantage. The willingness to share anecdotes makes the chapters more vivid and entertaining. Jack Rakove's essay gives a glimpse into Bernard Bailyn's famous Harvard seminar on colonial America. Bailyn parodied a course on research methodology that he had once taken, describing in agonizing detail each step in the selection and use of notecards, until the final step, which is to "throw the whole thing out the window." A fine chapter on Edmund Morgan, another scholar of colonial America, reveals him to be a non-believer. It is humbling to consider that Morgan and Perry Miller, the two most influential explicators of the thought of the New England Puritans, were both atheists. Their empathy, willingness to suspend their own beliefs, and historical imagination (disciplined by evidence) continue to set high standards for intellectual historians.

The most obvious drawback of the authors' affection for their subjects and their professional courtesy toward them (especially toward those who are still living) is, in a few of the essays, an unwillingness or inability to maintain critical distance. In the introduction, the editor declares, "The twelve historians covered herein are virtual heroes in the effort to revive history as an important academic discipline." Much of the rest of the book tends to maintain this hero-worshipping attitude. As a result, the essays sometimes fail to raise potentially important connections between the lives and scholarship of their subjects. For example, John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, both great historians of race relations in the United States, spent decades battling against the conservative scholarly consensus that underpinned the system of racial segregation in the South. But by the early 1970s, their liberal views and support of integration seemed out of step with the increasing popularity of black nationalism and a more polemical style of writing history. Did this sudden shift in the predominant sort of criticism they faced--from being called communist to being called racist and reactionary--affect their scholarship? Likewise, David Donald, a leading historian of the Civil War era, was born in Mississippi a couple of years after the First World War. He presumably grew up with the "Southern view" of the war between the states, then dominant within the American historical profession, which asserted that the Civil War had been needless and avoidable, that the abolitionists and radical Republicans had been villains, and that the efforts to "reconstruct" a South in which African-Americans exercised political power had been foolish and diabolic. How did Donald's own views evolve as historians turned all of these assumptions on their head? Or, to pick one more example, is it pure coincidence that Bernard Bailyn worked on a biography of Thomas Hutchinson, the Loyalist governor of Massachusetts deposed by the start of the American Revolution, at a time when student activism called into question all forms of authority on his own campus? We expect historians to consider such questions when they place intellectuals within a historical context. Insufficient attention in some of the essays to the relationship between the setting and the scholar is the most serious disappointment in this otherwise stimulating and enjoyable volume.

It is not as though the historians that the book describes were ivory tower eggheads oblivious to the societies in which they lived. Gerda Lerner helped found the National Organization of Women. John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward played significant roles in the Civil Rights movement. Richard Hofstadter took public stands at the time of the controversies over McCarthyism and the student left. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., placed his considerable narrative skills at the service of the Kennedy family and thereby, in the eyes of some observers, created doubts about his integrity as a scholar. Less publicly, during the late-1930s, Edmund Morgan's conscience was as tortured as that of Michael Wigglesworth, one of the Puritans he studied. Morgan hesitated between the need to oppose Hitler and his belief in the immorality of war. The fall of France in 1940 finally convinced him to abandon efforts to obtain conscientious-objector status. For the most part, such commitments did not impair the professional activities of these historians. Of course, historical scholarship suffers when historians crudely shape it to suit current political needs. But it also suffers when historians gain abstraction at the expense of completely detaching themselves from human experience.

Review by David Paull Nickles

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