History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880-1980.

History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880-1980. By Ellen Fitzpatrick (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. xi plus 318 pp. $39.95).

Since the early 1990s a great wave of books and articles on the nature of memory in human relations has swept through history, anthropology and other social science fields. The new theory of memory seems to have gained currency through the 1991 work of Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1994. (1) The French theory has taken many forms, but a common version has to do with the exploitation of the historical record, sometimes unconsciously, for political or other purposes. Collective forgetfulness can be part of the dynamic.

Fitzpatrick's stimulating and invaluable work is a subtle application of the theory to the historiography of American history for the century before 1980. She does not deal with the manipulation of memory/history in every historical trend of those hundred years, but emphasizes one central misleading feature in the recent writing of American history: the vociferous claim of the younger historians of the 1960s and 1970s that they had created a New History. She shows that they were not all that new and that they had to misrepresent past historians to vaunt the exceptional nature of their new work. She seeks to place the "newness" of the work of the "within the larger panorama of American historical writing in the twentieth century" (p. 6). She seeks to question

   the paradigm of "old" and "new" history by suggesting that the
   political roots of the new history reach back not simply to the 1960s
   and 1970s but deeper in the American past.... It is time now for
   both those who have celebrated and those who have criticized the new
   history to themselves "stand at the bar of historical justice" and
   face the past (6).

In the sixties and early seventies everything did indeed seem new, both in society and scholarship. A new generation of young historians gained access, they thought, to a clean slate on which to re-write the past in order to restore or emphasize topics that the previous generation, the so-called consensus historians, had allegedly ignored: conflict, race, gender, Native Americans, and social injustice. In the words of John Higham, who coined the expression "consensus history" in a famous essay of 1959, the works of historians like Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and even Richard Hofstadter represented "a massive grading operation to smooth over America's social convulsions." Commonality replaced conflict, and the consensus historians uncritically celebrated American exceptionalism and social peace. In the judgment of the "new historians" of the Sixties, the consensus historians of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s were guilty of producing a shallow and dishonest picture of the American past.

For anyone who taught and did research and editing during the sixties and early seventies the boastful younger historians of the day seemed justified in their claims. Quantitative methods, community studies, environmental studies; economic interpretation of slavery, industry, and labor; new studies of gender, class, ethnicity and culture; the history of "ordinary" people "from the bottom up" all seemed new and exciting. Older historians (like myself) tried to keep abreast of graduate students by attending seminars and conferences on the analysis of social history with computers, and one remembers struggling with great packs of IBM punch cards to do cross tabs on the relationships among class membership, ethnicity, upward mobility by examining how working hours were assigned within a factory, how many "meat meals" each ethnic or religious group could afford to feed their families in one week, and so on, in order to establish with the unassailable precision of figures and indices just what the relationship was, for example, between a male worker's ethnicity and his upward mobility.

One could easily get caught up in the excitement. But Fitzpatrick, atfer reading a century's worth of reviews, articles, books, association newsletters, private correspondence, and other materials, shows conclusively that the historians of the 1960s and 1970s had been manipulating memory. She documents the amazing frequency with which earlier historians had appropriated the term "new history" and the fact that even as far back as J. Franklin Jameson in 1885 historians had not shied away from conflict and class analysis. She sees major figures like Beard and Turner in a new light and she persuasively defends the achievements of forgotten figures like Annie Heloise Abel, Carter Woodson, Angie Debo, and several others in confronting the seamier sides of the American Experience, sometimes with cost to their own careers.

Fitzpatrick structures her book chronologically, marching from historian to historian with clear and judicious judgments, always relating their work to their predecessors. Beard owed much to E. R. A. Seligman, Angie Debo to her mentors Edward Everett Dale and Grant Foreman. Particularly imaginative is her use of one whole chapter to show how during the interwar period the study of Native American history became a moral compass for historians, many of whom came to see the Native Americans in their full humanity for the first time. Several scholars like Angie Debo, Paul Gates, and Annie Heloise Abel exposed the sordid policies of the federal and state governments more thoroughly than any historians since their time. She does not neglect the interplay between topic and author, geographical place and historical moment, class and authorial outlook, discrimination against women and blacks and the need to resist. Her depiction of these tensions reaches a high point in her moving account of Angle Debo's struggle to find employment and to have her work published. Fitzpatrick devotes perhaps a fourth of her book to rescuing and rebuilding the reputations of African-American historians and women historians. Particularly refreshing and illuminating is the prominence she gives to women historians like Vera Shlakman, Constance Greene, Caroline Ware, Angle Debo, Alice Morse Earle, Alice Felt Tyler, Edith Abbott, and several others. Oddly, certain men who were giants in their day like Charles McLean Andrews, Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commaget, and Daniel J. Boorstin make either a brief appearance or none at all.

Despite its title and the newness of this theory of memory, Fitzpatrick's book falls into the old traditional category of the history of historiography--not at all a bad thing. While we have been well served by brilliant special works like those of Peter Novick (2) and others, we have never had, up to now, a critical, narrative, systematic overview of our historiography in the old German tradition. Ellen Fitzpatrick has supplied that need in exemplary fashion.

And yet, and yet .... old veterans can hardly give up their conviction something did change in the 1960s and 1970s, and that the reverberations are still with us. But exactly what happened remains to be explained.

ENDNOTES

1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. The wave has reached my own narrow field of Mormon history. Among several studies in manuscript, one of the best is by Professor Kathleen Flake of Vanderbilt University Divinity School: "Re-placing Memory: Latter-day Saint Use of Historical Monuments and Narrative in the Early Twentieth Century" (2002).

2. Novick, That Noble Dream: the "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK, 1989).

Mario Depillis

University of Massachusetts