Alfred F. Young

Beyond the American Revolution : explorations in the history of American radicalism

Contributors include Alfred F. Young, Gary J. Kornblith, John M. Murrin, Allan Kulikoff, Edward Countryman, Peter H. Wood, W. J. Rorabaugh, Alan Taylor, Michael Merrill, Sean Wilentz, and Cathy N. Davidson.

An Outsider and the Progress of a Career in History

S I worked recently on an essay on how historians responded to J. Franklin Jamesons classic The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (I926), especially during the long era in which the Cold War and McCarthyism dominated historical discourse about revolutions, I started thinking about where I fit in or, as it were, did not fit in. In I946-i947, in the historiography course at Columbia University, graduate students were required to write an essay about how various historians had treated a given subject, analyzing their controlling assumptions drawn from their life and times, philosophy of history, and historical method. I chose the Declaration of Independence. The point was not to get a fix on a historian by reducing him to a reflection of his times: Bancroft was a Jacksonian, Beard was a Progressive. It was rather: here is the historian, there is his subject, here am I, and until I have command of the original sources, I have to go through the historian to get to the subject and to evaluate his use or misuse of the sources. Some graduate students now find historiography a drag. I found this mild dose of historical relativism liberating, a lifetime immunization shot against a discipline that likes to palm off its scholarship as value free.1 Of course, you go through a similar sifting process to understand the context of the primary sources. As I learned in working on the memoirs of a Boston shoemaker taken down sixty years after his experiences in the American Revolution, memory in the elderly can be excellent, but the reader has to perform a number of exercises to peel back the layers the rememberer cannot help imposing on his memories.2 Consider the expectations of the audience for whom the memoir is written: in my case, readers of the William and Mary Quarterly, my professional peers, judgmental by trade; friends, some of them impatient with the priorities I set for my scholarship; students and other newcomers, only dimly aware of past professional struggles. Consider the present frame of mind of the writer, in my case after five