S I worked recently on an essay on how historians responded to J. Franklin Jameson's classic The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (I926), especially during the long era in which the Cold War and McCarthyism dominated historical discourse about revolutions, I started thinking about where I fit in or, as it were, did not fit in. In I946-i947, in the historiography course at Columbia University, graduate students were required to write an essay about how various historians had treated a given subject, analyzing their controlling assumptions drawn from their life and times, philosophy of history, and historical method. I chose the Declaration of Independence. The point was not to get a fix on a historian by reducing him to a reflection of his times: Bancroft was a Jacksonian, Beard was a Progressive. It was rather: here is the historian, there is his subject, here am I, and until I have command of the original sources, I have to go through the historian to get to the subject and to evaluate his use or misuse of the sources. Some graduate students now find historiography a drag. I found this mild dose of historical relativism liberating, a lifetime immunization shot against a discipline that likes to palm off its scholarship as value free.1 Of course, you go through a similar sifting process to understand the context of the primary sources. As I learned in working on the memoirs of a Boston shoemaker taken down sixty years after his experiences in the American Revolution, memory in the elderly can be excellent, but the reader has to perform a number of exercises to peel back the layers the rememberer cannot help imposing on his memories.2 Consider the expectations of the audience for whom the memoir is written: in my case, readers of the William and Mary Quarterly, my professional peers, judgmental by trade; friends, some of them impatient with the priorities I set for my scholarship; students and other newcomers, only dimly aware of past professional struggles. Consider the present frame of mind of the writer, in my case after five