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III. New Left , New Social History
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American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution” 75 By 1982 Robert Shalhope, who in 1972 considered the republican synthesis pervasive, found that the research of the ten years gone by made clear that “it is no longer possible to see a single, monolithic ideology characterizing American thought on the eve of the Revolution.”151 And in 1992 Daniel T. Rodgers’s review of “the career of a concept” summed up what was missing: “It squeezed out massive domains of culture—religion, law, political economy, ideas of patriarchy, family and gender, ideas of race and slavery, class and nationalism, nature and reason—that everyone knew to be profoundly tangled in the revolutionary impulse.” John Shy summed up the longstanding skepticism of a wide range of scholars when he said in an interview, “What is troubling me at this moment about the state of American historical writing and thinking about the revolutionary period is the assumption that there is a single unitary culture that holds something that can be accurately described as an ideology. . . . And frankly I just don’t believe it. I am ready to be convinced, I think, but I have not been convinced.”152 Almost all of this challenge dealt with the argument on terrain Bailyn and Wood had staked out in the realm of ideas or at the point of origins. “The transforming radicalism of the revolution” went untested at the point of consequences and in the social and economic terrain until the emergence of historians of “the New Left” and “the new social history.” III. New Left, New Social History 8. The New Left Among historians there were two New Lefts: the first around Studies on the Left (1959–67), a journal founded by graduate students in history at (Cambridge, MA, 1992), quotation at 277; see also Appleby, “Liberalism and the American Revolution ,” and Appleby, “The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology,” in Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism, 140–60, 161–87. 151 Robert Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 29 (1972): 49– 80; Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 39 (1982): 334–56, quotation at 346. 152 Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11–38, quotation at 17; for a critique in the Progressive tradition, see Colin Gordon, “Crafting a Usable Past,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 46 (1989): 679–95; Loretta Valtz Mannucci , “Four Conversations on Future Directions in Revolutionary War Historiography,” Storia Nordamericana 2 (1985): 118–19 (John Shy). 76 Alfred F. Young the University of Wisconsin associated with William Appleman Williams and the “radicalism of disclosure,” the second, beginning later in the 1960s, associated with Staughton Lynd and Jesse Lemisch and “history from the bottom up.” The two groups shared a distaste for the politics and historiography of the Old Left but were in tension with each other. Eventually, as Peter Novick has pointed out, “the new, left-oriented historians who became visible within the profession during the 1960s came to be capitalized, reified and often tacitly homogenized as ‘New Left historians.’ This was a largely empty and misleading designation, lumping together individuals of the most diverse orientation, and often, innocently or maliciously, associating them with the most extreme wing of the student movement.” Yet distortions aside, there were New Left historians of the Revolution who laid out contrasting radical visions of the transformations of the era that challenged Progressives as well as counter-Progressives.153 New Left historians found few models in an Old Left American historiography dating to the 1930s either for doing history or for interpreting the Revolution. The Old Left scholarship on the Revolution was in different ways a tail on the Progressive kite. In the late 1930s, on the one hand, was Louis M. Hacker’s Triumph of American Capitalism, a highly schematic economic-determinist Marxism with no sense of agency, which saw the Revolution as the triumph of mercantile capitalism leading inevitably to the victory of industrial capitalism. Hacker was an economist at Columbia whose interpretation circulated in the 1950s (long after he recanted his youthful exuberance), probably because it fit the caricature of Marxism as economic determinism. At the other pole was a book by Jack Hardy, The First American Revolution, brought out by International Publishers; Hardy read the Sons of Liberty radicals as if they were a vanguard party leading the masses to revolution...