Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

IN HIS CLASSIC STUDY of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century social thought in America, Morton White suggested that Progressives were the first social thinkers to take seriously the idea that society must be understood as a product of continuous historical change. This understanding of history, he noted, came late to America. I Indeed, that is something of an understatement, for Europeans preceded us in their awareness of historicism by almost a hundred years-rather long for a provincial lag. If White's timing is correct, and I believe it is, the belated appearance of historicism in American culture is more striking and problematical than he realized. Historicism took root in America just at the moment when Europeans began to recognize its disturbing relativistic implications and make efforts to escape them. This contrasting development offers opportunities for comparative analysis and requires a closer look at historical consciousness in America bef`re the Progressives. White did not ask how Americans understood history prior to the advent of historicism. Until we have answered that question, we cannot know whether the victory of historicism was as complete as he presumed. What White presented as an unalloyed triunmph of historicism may well turn out to be a more complex story than he allowed. The foundation on which to build an understanding of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century America has been constructed by two generations of scholars of Puritanism and millennialism-most notably Perry Miller, Ernest Tuveson, and Sacvan Bercovitch.2 More recently historians have recognized that republicanism is an essential part of the structure.3 Although much mnore primary research needs to