OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, AMERICAN HISTORY has splintered. Indeed, the fragmenting has become so obvious that it is a commonplace in discussions of the state of the American field.1 The principal source of that disarray has been an explosion of historical information, particularly in social history. The seminal work on the history of slavery in the 1960s stimulated historians to take the same imaginative and probing approaches to the history of cities, blacks, Chicanos, Indians, immigrants, families, and women, and even to transform the history of the economy and politics. Groups and subjects ignored in traditional history suddenly became visible, clamoring for inclusion in a historical framework that once had no place for them. On one level, this informational explosion is what we expect in history, a subject well recognized for changing its content as the society it serves asks new questions and makes new demands. That is the good side of the splintering. On the less appealing side, we have no clear way of determining how this new knowledge will be integrated into what we call the history of the United States. Simply to tack the new information onto the old story disrupts the organizing framework and renders the new version disjointed and incoherent. Perhaps the most successful and enduring of the framing interpretations for the United States was that created by the Progressive historians: Carl L. Becker, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard, and the literary historian Vernon Louis Parrington. The heart of their story was the conflict between democracy and privilege, the poor versus the rich, the farmers against the monopolists, the workers against the corporations, and, at times, the Free-Soilers against the slaveholders. That pattern of interpretation came under attack in the 1950s and has been falling into disuse ever since. Its successor, which has been called the