An Agenda for Early American History

Abstract

30 Historically Speaking · March/April 2005 Unless I am mistaken, political history is not far behind. How many universities today offer courses on the English, French, and Russian Revolutions? In how many places is the evolution of parliamentary government a focus? British historians tell me that, in the United States, English constitutional history is a dying field. I hear the like from Renaissance historians. If so, general trends would help explain the apparent decline in the number of scholars working on or even teaching the American founding. I do not mean to denigrate the work done by social and economic historians, but I do assert the centrality ofpolitical history understood in the broadest possible sense. The other fields are in the end ancillary. Their greatest value lies in the contribution they make to political understanding, which is, let me underline, very considerable. One need only consider the manner in which slavery shaped the early American republic to seejust how much social and economic historians can teach political historians. My worry is that we have forgotten what is central and what is ancillary, that we are rapidly descending into an aimless antiquarianism, and that we are denying our students the tools that they desperately need ifthey are to function effectively and intelligently as citizens. Let me pose a question at the end. Why is it that the profession seems increasingly in the grips of a hostility to politics? We do not hire military historians because we regard their interests as distasteful. To an increasing degree, we regard diplomatic historians in the same fashion. After all, they, too, are interested in the projection of power. Will political history soon be a field that "decent people" will not touch? Paul A. Rahe is Jay P. Walker Professor ofHistory at the University ofTulsa. He is the author o/Republics Ancient and Modem: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1992). An Agenda for Early American History Jack Rakove Scholars of a certain age, when asked to reflect on the state of their field, are entitled to wax autobiographical, so I begin by recalling my own association with Pauline Maier. When I started graduate school at Harvard in 1969, she was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her first book, From Resistance to Revolution, came out as I was starting my dissertation and helped shaped some of the questions I asked in its opening chapters. We had carrels in the same quarantined zone of Widener Library where typing was permitted and where we chatted about our common interests, like making sense of Samuel Adams. (I trace the origins ofmy own dissertation to a casual remark that our mutual mentor, Bernard Bailyn, once made to me over lunch: if you could explain what Adams was up to, you might account for 30 % ofthe causation of the American Revolution. Without yet knowing what multiple regression was, that number seemed big enough to warrant further thought.) A third of a century (and now many e-mails) later, our interests still overlap; she is working on the Constitution, as I have, and I am doing a book called Revolutionaries (not wholly unlike her second book, The Old Revolutionaries). Both of us are trying to bridge the gap between scholarship and lay readership that is the topic of her second "disjunction," in the process shedding our common editor and publisher, hiring literary agents, and testing the market in a way that would have seemed inconceivable during the Nixon years. It should not surprise, therefore, that I respond favorably to most of Maier's assessment of the state of early American history. The substantive points that matter most, I believe, are those concerned with her first disjunction, between the primarily social and cultural character of scholarship addressed to the colonial era proper, and the avowedly political emphases of the study of the Revolution. To start out as an early Americanist in the early 1970s was bliss. Both parts of the field were hot. The demographic studies of New England communities were just appearing, followed within a few years by a surge of similar work on the Chesapeake, as well as Peter Wood's pathbreaking...