Painting the Big Picture: Syntheses of Urban History and Development

PAINTING THE BIG PICTURE: SYNTHESES OF URBAN HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT KennethFox. Metropolitan America: Urban Life and UrbanPolicy in the Unites States, 1940-1980. Jackson: TheUniversityPress of Mississippi, 1986. xiii + 264 pp. MichaelA. Goldberg and John Mercer. The Myth of theNorth American City: Continentalism Challenged. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986.xx + 308 pp. JonC. Teaford. The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem,Promise and Reality. Baltimore: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1986. x + 177 pp. Bruce C. Daniels CottonMather, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman betrayed no intellectual diffidence when painting their versions of the big picture of American history. With an eye for both detail and panorama, they filled their canvases with unhesitant brush-strokes and created strong, clear portraits. Mather left us a pictureof the New Israel, Bancroft of the flowering of democracy, and Parkman of the struggle among European nations to control North America. All three pictureshave faded with time, but in their own times they were bright enough to command the attention of all who chose to look. Some viewed them with awe, somewith anger: the contempt of their critics attests to their influence as much as the praise of their admirers. Expecting an historian to measure up to a Mather, Bancroft or Parkman is unfair and a little like asking any practising artist to be a John Copley or Gilbert Stuart. In one sense, almost every professional historian today is superior to Mather, Bancroft and Parkman. Today's scholars are trained to have more rigorous standards of proof, have a larger body of theory and methodology upon which to draw, and have the benefit of the thousands of pieces of history being published every year. In the same sense, of course, presumably all high-school studentswho pass physics know more about the universe than Newton did. But, theworld of science has yet to produce Newton's equal. There are only a few great minds in any generation and the generality of artists, historians and physicists haveto be content with being journeymen in their fields. 102 Bruce C. Daniels One of the things that most present historians seem to lack is the sense of certitude Mather, Bancroft and Parkman had. Today's historians are often courageous, bright and literate; but, in the twentieth century, the study of history has not produced confidence in a knowable past. At times, the historical profession seems to be intellectually immobilized, bogged down in a mire of detail, conflict and obscurantism. Ironically, modem scholarship's sophistication and commitment to excellence are often seen to cause the problem. As an historian stands on Mather's shoulders, several thousand colleagues and graduate students are looking over his or her shoulders; secularism, liberalism, and existentialism have eroded everyone's faith; multi-variate analysis looms as a terror ready to disprove empirically the daring assertion. How can any one have the confidenceto sit back and paint the big picture? A Mather, Bancroft or Parkman might fairlybe accused of lunacy in the 1980s or of having suicidal impulses. Lamenting the Balkanization of history has become fashionable in the lastfew years. More than any other group, social historians have borne the brunt of the criticism: the argument often advanced is that case studies, predictive models and statistical analysis have broken our sense of the past into tiny fragments that have no clear relationship to each other. This is absurd. The Balkanization of historyif there is such a thing-began with the professionalization of the discipline inthe late nineteenth century and has continued ever since. When thousands of people began earning their living through writing and teaching history, specialization quickened its pace. Of necessity, there has always been some specialization even in the work of a Mather, Bancroft or Parkman. But, specialization among historians in the twentieth century has been more pronounced. This is equally true for medicine, science, social science and almost every sphere of knowledge. On the surface, it certainly appears that the big picture has been the casualtyof this specialization. Perhaps its demise is not altogether unfortunate. Those magnificent canvases of Mather's, Bancroft's and Parkman's were flawed representations of reality-to put it bluntly, they were wrong or certainly more wrong than right. The...