Confessions of a Consensus Historian

Abstract

I did not set out to become a consensus historian, In fact, I don't recall hearing the term until the 1960s, when revisionist scholars made it a dirty word. It was only when I discovered just what it meant that I realized that I was in that camp. To be a consensus historian meant looking at American exceptionalism as an explanation of America's history, different from and superior to the experiences of other nations. I was always uncomfortable with the notion of superiority but not with the conviction that the United States enjoyed a history in the New World that contrasted with the miseries of the Old World. My fascination with the study of history had little to do with the assumptions of consensus history. The romance of history, particularly European history, attracted me. The wars of rival nation-states no less than the rise and fall of the Roman Empire fascinated me, with the horrors of the past removed from my consciousness. I read my father's copies of Gibbon and Trevelyan but was most impressed with the historical novels of G. A. Henty, whose many books followed the adventures of young heroes ranging from the city-states of Renaissance Italy to the Judean rebellion against the Romans. Whatever the setting, the protagonists were essentially teen-aged Englishmen.