Clio Confused: Troubling Aspects of Historical Study From the Perspective of U. S. History by David J. Russo (review)

BookReviews 151 inclusiveness in their texts, the implication here is disturbing: nonpolitically correct texts need not apply. Many readers will sympathize with Berkhofer's aversion to Master Narratives , despite the threats of fragmentation and cacophony. The deliberate abandonment of an integrated "story" is a more difficult prescription to follow . Moreover, if there are no ground rules to sort out history from propaganda, why should a skeptical public read historians at all? Promoting subjective self-awareness and communal diversity are no substitute for ways of harmonizing interpretations and selecting among them. For many professionals themselves, the old canons of interpretation-coherent argument, consistency with the traces of the past, completeness encouraging the inclusion of many voices-are likely to seem as secure as Berkhofer's uncharted terrain. Martin S. Staum University of Calgary David J. Russo. Clio Confused: Troubling Aspects of Historical Study From the Perspective of U. S. History. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995. Pp. x + 158. Although Clio Confused is not titled as an autobiography, it takes the form of a free ranging personal reflection based on thirty years of writing and teaching American history, particularly local history. Author David Russo, from McMaster University, suggestively engages some of the most important issues facing contemporary historians-the problem of synthesis in an increasingly specialized profession, the continuing focus on the nation state in American historiography in an era of globalization, the erosion of a largely nineteenth-century conception of the profession's project, the relationship of history teaching to national identity, and the role of historical thinking in public discourse. Russo is by turns insightful, provocative, outrageous, and in the end, theoretically naive, but he succeeds, at least in setting the agenda for a spirited argument. Arguing that intellectual, social, cultural, and economic activities rarely coincide with political boundaries, Russo disputes the centrality of a political 152 Canadian Review of America.n Studies framework-the emphasis on the nation state-in the narration of American history. "Americans would have a much clearer view of the world and of humanity," he declares at the outset, "if they would realize that they are first and foremost human beings, each of whom has many forms of identity that he or she possesses concurrently, and hopefully, harmoniously" (10). By focusing on a human past, he contends, historians would recognize that individuals have multiple allegiances according to age, gender, sexuality, occupation, and class that cut across national and political boundaries. Thus it would make no sense to write about an American economy, society, or culture. Russo's thesis builds on the work of social historians and scholars in cultural studies that has undermined the primacy of the nation state in American historical writing in recent years. Yet, as David A. Hollinger has reminded us, American intellectuals since World War II have rejected universalist models of explanation in the social sciences, insisting that assertions of a common humanity masked a colonial and largely Eurocentric, cultural imperialism ("How Wide the Circle of 'We'? American Intellectuals and the Problem of Ethnos Since World War II," American Historical Review 98 (1993), 317-37). Russo may have unwittingly accepted a long discarded Enlightenment vision of a universal, irreducible humanity as the basis for a more accurate history than the focus on the nation state allows. Certainly many historians would dispute his almost essentialist claim that age, gender, and sexuality are "universal human classifications" (94). While I think that he is right to subordinate the place of the nation state in historical interpretation, I think that he has ignored or perhaps rejected without saying so the compelling insight that identities are inventions, creations of time and place that are grounded in particular historical circumstances. Russo's argument, moreover, leads him to make some puzzling and unsupported judgments. In his attempt to explain the allegiance that people accord to particular political systems, Russo asks why the poor don't revolt against the wealthy. Throughout Western history, he suggests, the acquisition of wealth has been a constant value that has discouraged revolutionary and resistant tendencies. Not only does Russo ignore the history of the repression of poor people's movements, he also undervalues the many ways short of successful revolution in which the...