The End of Historiography?

"Thus, in the same way that the New Left historians contested the interpretations of the consensus and Progressive historians before them, so have subsequent generations of American historians elaborated, synthesized, and revised the work of Kolko, Weinstein, Gutman, and others. This recent work is more sophisticated both from the top down and the bottom up. Today's liberal-left historians have come much closer to achieving what the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm called 'the history of society' rather than concentrating exclusively on the agency of the powerful, or on white working class and African-American resistance to the powerful. As Eric Foner wrote in the preface to his magisterial (the word is here, for once, used with its full weight) Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, he wished to '[transcend] the present compartmentalization of historical study into "social" and "political" components' and to 'view the period as a whole, integrating the social, political, and economic aspects of Reconstruction into a coherent, analytical narrative.'"

In a 2015 Democracy article, Rich Yeselson explores New Left and post-New Left historiography.

No Wave

"'Feminism Unfinished,' however, argues that the 'wave' metaphor obscures the history of a continuous American women's movement sustained by labor activists, civil rights advocates and ­social-reform campaigners, who may have looked placid on the surface but were paddling like hell underneath."


Elaine Showalter in The Washington Post reviews Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry's Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements.

A Paler Shade of White

"The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color—white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black—but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-­scientific term for a race known as 'white.'"

Linda Gordon in The New York Times reviews Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.