"Something Meritorious—Historical and Literary—Was Going On in the Writing of American History During the Mid- to Late Twentieth Century"

"Along with Richard Hofstadter, Schlesinger and Woodward were among the most influential and certainly the best-known members of an extraordinary generation of American historians, by which I mean historians of the United States and its colonial antecedents. Born between 1900 and 1920, the cohort included, among other luminaries, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin, John Higham, Edmund S. Morgan, David M. Potter, and Kenneth M. Stampp. They shared neither a common subject inside American history nor a single point of view. All of them wrestled creatively with the legacy of the so-called Progressive historians who preceded them, including Charles A. Beard, Vernon L. Parrington, and 
Frederick Jackson Turner. That wrestling opened lines of investigation and reinterpretation that changed fundamentally the way historians and their readers think about 
the American past."


In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz reviews The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and The Letters of C. Vann Woodward .