A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early America

Abstract

FS OR Americans, writing and teaching the history of their own country represents a special intellectual enterprise, different from that of studying Germany or China or Nigeria. Like all histories, national history springs from the human fascination with self-discovery, from persistent concerns about the nature of social existence and our engagement with it, but with American history, a relatively open-ended search about the past collides with the vigilant censors of patriotic pride and national self-imaging. Through the years, these censors have been most invested in the proposition that the United States marks out the political path of the future, leaving historians to scour the past for evidence of this role. Since American progress had first become manifest with the nationbuilding acts of Revolution and constitution writing, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were turned into a prologue to the history of the United States, the pathbreaking republic and exemplary society. Declaring their independence from this whiggish historiography, early American historians of the last generation have attached themselves to a European frame of reference that, perversely, has had a liberating effect on their scholarship. The liberation early American scholars have sought is from that patriotic narrative that insistently accorded the United States an exceptional destiny even when, as with the Progressives, that destiny was used as a standard for calibrating shortcomings. With roots reaching deep into the pasts of ancient Greece and medieval England, American institutions stood forth, in this account, as both climax and new beginning. As the organic metaphor suggests, seeds once planted-be they town meetings or the practice of religious toleration-require only a favorable setting to come to fruition. And for many years historical scholarship on early America drew on this image of potent plantings in a uniquely favored environment to explain how a great nation emerged from a cluster of British colonies growing on the Atlantic shelf of North America. Trapped