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.