Reflections: Doing American History in a World of Subcultures

Like most historians I took up the subject in part because I was simply fascinated by the past; but in settling on history as my vocation, more important was that I had a lot of questions about why my worlds were shaped the way they were. I grew up in a Pennsylvania town in a spacious family house that went back five generations and bore the marks of faded Victorian respectability. The town itself had several subcultures, two of which I knew well: that of the modest refinement of small-town elites like my maternal grandmother, with whom my family lived; and the small town/rural working-class culture of most of my friends. In addition, in the 1940s and 1950s, another ubiquitous sort of culture came in on the airwaves from Hollywood and New York, representing far more cosmopolitan outlooks that also influenced everyone. In our town, Ozzie and Harriet seemed like sophisticates, and the juxtaposition of these several subcultures could be fascinating. For instance, even if it was not quite the Northern counterpart to Yoknapatawpha County, the town had a sense of the past; and the Civil War was a vivid, if indirect, memory. To stretch the point only slightly, when my grandmother was watching our new TV, it was a bit like Mary Chestnut meets "The Honeymooners."

Intriguing as were these cultural contrasts, the motive that became a passion to study American history was my desire to understand two other subcultures in which I found myself deeply immersed by my later teens: that of my religious heritage and that of mainstream academia. Each of these was intellectually formidable and was attractive to me personally. I grew up in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, in which my father was a pastor and then an executive. The OPC prided itself on preserving intact the Calvinism of the Old School Presbyterian and Old Princeton Seminary tradition. Orthodox Presbyterians were now cultural outsiders, including in my hometown. Yet they also had a mainstream educational heritage that had something to do with my father's decision that I should attend Haverford College. Haverford had been shaped by broad Quaker principles of a Philadelphia elite and in the 1950s was an impressively humane center for mainstream liberal learning. At Haverford my Biblicist and strictly Presbyterian religious outlook seemed as quaintly out of date as did the "thee" and "thou" spoken by an ancient Quaker gentleman who still resided on campus. I loved the humane learning and I loved my religious heritage. My historical question was: how did it happen that in the world in which I found myself, the Old School Presbyterian outlook, which only generations earlier had been at least eminently respectable, had come to look so hopelessly out of date?

In trying to answer such questions I came to be particularly intrigued with the cultural factors that help shape the way people come to their various beliefs and practices. How do fundamental beliefs, assumptions, moral values, codes of practice and the like get passed from one generation to the next and what forces shape the changes in what gets passed on? Especially fascinating to me have been questions regarding American pluralism in this regard. How do American subcommunities, particularly religiously based subcommunities, relate to the larger common culture? How do they pass on from generation to generation the assumptions, beliefs, values and the like that are peculiar to their own heritage at the same time that they are constantly being shaped by and are responding to more common cultural outlooks and to the forces that shape those outlooks?

This was still the early 1960s and supposed to be the era of "consensus history," but my peculiar religious heritage made me question claims that the culture ought to be moving toward a consensus. In addition to stellar graduate training in American Studies at Yale (my teachers included Sydney Ahlstrom, Edmund S. Morgan, David Potter, John Blum, C. Vann Woodward, and R. W. B. Lewis), I studied at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, which helped me in formulating a distinct theoretical basis for my approach. Theologically and in its...