Crafting a Usable Past: Consensus, Ideology, and Historians of the American Revolution

Abstract

H TISTORIANS of America tend to be intellectual nationalists. They are, after all, both students and citizens of the society in which they live. They may feel a filial obligation to that society, a desire to celebrate its traditions and to affirm the relevance of themselves and their work. [T]he sense we make of the history of our national origins, noted Bernard Bailyn, helps to define for us, as it has for generations before us, the values, purposes, and acceptable characteristics of our political institutions and cultural life. In scholarship, these predilections tempt historians with the notion of a usable past-with the possibility of finding historical relevance and happiness. Historical memory is easily clouded by optimism, apologia, or sentimentality, and the past is too often recalled for present purposes. Celebrations of Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy, New Freedom or New Deal, Gilded Age or Great Society, however, all pale beside the historiography of the nation's primal moment. No other epoch has suffered the relentless energy of conservative and consensus interpretation that has attempted to -make a neat and attractive package of Revolutionary America.1 The last purely optimistic interpretation of the Revolution is usually