The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History

During the past several decades we have experienced the culmination of what began over forty years ago—what one historian has called "a historiographical revolution." Since the 1960s new people have entered the profession and new subjects have been opened up for research. Instead of writing about statesmen, generals, diplomats, and elite institutions, historians began concentrating on ordinary folk and marginal people: the poor, the oppressed, and the silent. By the 1970s this new social history of hitherto forgotten people had come to dominate academic history writing. Although some historians continued to write political and institutional histories, most began writing about everything else but politics. In fact, there is scarcely an aspect of human behavior that historians over the past generation have not written about—from divorce to dying, from the consumption of goods to child rearing. Historians began delving into the most private, subjective, and least accessible aspects of the past, including marriage, sexual relations, and child abuse. Social science, especially anthropology and ethnography, enabled some historians to reconstruct from riots, rituals, and other kinds of popular nonverbal behavior in the past the beliefs and attitudes of the masses of ordinary men and women who left no written record. Others used social science to compile quantitative data on economic development, population growth, and rates of marriage and death. The profession turned out more and more complex, technical, and specialized renditions of the past that fewer and fewer people were reading.

Several indices revealed that the American people were becoming less and less interested in the kind of social history academics were teaching and writing. From 1970-71 to 1985-86, years when there was a boom in student enrollments, the number of history degrees granted by all American colleges and universities declined almost by two-thirds, from 44,663 to 16,413. A drop in membership of the American Historical Association in the 1970s and 1980s was itself a sign of this weakening interest in history. The evidence compiled by Peter Novick in his That Noble Dream, published in 1988, reinforced the impression of a decline in academic history writing. Novick argued that the historical profession during the 1970s and 1980s seemed to have lost a unified sense of purpose; without a clear sense any longer of America's role in history, the discipline seemed to becoming apart. "In no other field was there such a widespread sense of disarray; in no other discipline did so many leading figures express dismay and discouragement at the current state of their realm." Many historians tended to see themselves as simply congeries of specialists solving technical problems and talking mostly to one another.

At the same time Novick was reaching his pessimistic conclusions, some historians began reacting against the disarray and calling for a return to narrative, to the kind of storytelling that, presumably, history was always noted for. Still others, however, wanted no part of a return to a traditional grand narrative, which they associated with the sort of history writing that had kept women and minorities out of the national story. They wanted instead to promote multicultural diversity, and discovered they could best do so by transforming social history into cultural history. Social history tended to be structurally descriptive and not ideally suited to the historians' desire to see people in all their variety and distinctiveness. By contrast, cultural history offered a way of penetrating through the large-scale economic and social structures of society into the many different identities and cultures of people in the society. Although the new cultural history tended to increase the fragmentation and disarray, it soon came to dominate the profession.

By the late 1980s most historians in the United States had stopped compiling computer printouts and invoking Pearson correlation coefficients and had begun concentrating almost exclusively on cultural history, focusing especially on issues of race and gender. By now little else seems to matter. In 2006 the Organization of American Historians sponsored the publication of The Best American History Essays 2006. This was a collection of the ten best articles in American history as selected by...