American Behavioral History: An Introduction

Preface

Preface This is a book about a new way of using history, to understand basic aspects of human and social behavior—in this case, in the United States, but potentially more widely. Of course, like most novel endeavors, it is not fully new. We all use history to explain phenomena such as current voting patterns (which often seem surprisingly, even troublingly, rooted in the past). We readily see certain current institutions emerging from a combination of change and continuity from the past. But we have typically subjected only a fraction of relevant behaviors to historical scrutiny, and for their part some of the most imaginative historians, when opening new topics in the past, have been a bit timid about bringing them forward to explicate the present. The book thus springs from recognition of the utility of the explosion of historical knowledge over the past forty years, though it focuses on deliberately grasping the present as emerging from the past. The book does not invite all historians to do behavioral history and does not claim that history alone explains key behaviors. But there is a missed opportunity in the current gap between historical innovations and the range of vantage points available on distinctive features of contemporary values and actions . Behavioral history requires quite explicit analysis from historians, beyond some of the conventional presentations in the discipline, and this can be truly exciting. It requires new openness from scholars in other disciplines —and happily, there are many signs of this trend already, in fields such as alcohol or obesity studies. It deserves new attention from interested users of history, alongside the more familiar entertainment fare of battles and biographies. There is nothing wrong with the latter, but there are opportunities for historical exploration of dominant assumptions and practices that are simply too important to be neglected. ix Behavioral history coins a new approach, but it depends on the work of countless scholars in social and cultural history over the past generation and more, and it invites a new commitment, from history training programs on up, to widen history’s utility just as its field of inquiry has expanded . x Preface ...