Gordon S. Wood

Imagined histories : American historians interpret the past

PrefaceIntroduction3Ch. 1Exceptionalism21Ch. 2Gender41Ch. 3Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution59Ch. 4The New and Newer Histories: Social Theory and Historiography in an American Key85Ch. 5Explaining Racism in American History107Ch. 6Crevecoeurs Question: Historical Writing on Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity120Ch. 7The Relevance and Irrelevance of American Colonial History144Ch. 8Nineteenth-Century American History164Ch. 9Americans and the Writing of Twentieth-Century United States History185Ch. 10Western Civilization206Ch. 11American Classical Historiography222Ch. 12In the Mirrors Eye The Writing of Medieval History in America238Ch. 13The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA263Ch. 14Between Whig Traditions and New Histories: American Historical Writing about Reformation and Early Modern Europe295Ch. 15Prescotts Paradigm American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain324Ch. 16The American Historiography of the French Revolution349Ch. 17Modern Europe in American Historical Writing393Ch. 18Clio in Tauris American Historiography on Russia415Ch. 19House of Mirrors American History-Writing on Japan434List of Contributors455Index459

The American counterrevolution : a retreat from liberty, 1783-1800

Americans, thrilled with newly won independence in 1783, set out to create a new form of government, one in which equality for all would be the underpinning of society. Yet by 1800, voting rights remained accessible only to a landed aristocracy; slavery was codified in the Constitution; and women were no freer than they had been prior to the Revolution. The American Counterrevolution is an expansive study of this difficult period that traces our shift from the ideals of liberty to the politics of order. A refutation of virtually the entire historiography surrounding the outcomes of the Revolution, this epic narrative will change how we view American democracy.

The American Enlightenment

The ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 was greeted with more excitement and more unanimity among the American people than at any time since the Declaration of Independence a decade earlier. “ ’Tis done!” declared Benjamin Rush in July 1788. “We have become a nation.” This was an extravagant claim, to say the least. Yet Rush thought that the new United States had become a nation virtually overnight. Everywhere in America, he said, there was “such a tide of joy as has seldom been felt in any age or country. …Justice has descended from heaven to dwell in our land, and ample restitution has at last been made to human nature by our new Constitution of all the injuries she has sustained in the old world from arbitrary government, false religions, and unlawful commerce.” The new nation represented the “triumph of knowledge over ignorance, of virtue over vice, and of liberty over slavery.”1

Russian-American dialogue on the American Revolution

Russian-American Dialogue on the American Revolution is the second volume to be published in the Russian-American Dialogues series. Written by some of the most highly respected Russian historians of our time, including Nikolai N. Bolkhovitonov, Gennadi P. Kuropiatnik, Boris M. Shpotov, and V. L. Ushakov, this is a collection of essays on topics pertaining to the American Revolution--the single most important event in American history. Many Russian scholars have studied the American Revolution because they believe it is what has linked together the destinies of the American people and the people of the former Soviet Union through much of the twentieth century. Each Russian essay is followed by a commentary from a noted American historian of the American Revolution, such as Jack P. Greene, Ronald Hoffman, James A. Henretta, and Pauline Maier. Most of the Russian authors, in turn, respond to the American critiques, a few of them quite strongly. These rebuttals are included with the essays and responses, resulting in a fascinating critical dialogue between the West and the East.Many of the Russian historians have written on the same subjects that American historians have examined: the politics of the Continental Congress, the Articles of Confederation, Shayss Rebellion, and the ideas and activities of the Founding Fathers. However, a significant difference between the Russian and the American approaches to the subjects and events of the Revolution is seen in the frequent Russian application of Marxist principles to the subjects under discussion. American historians will find it fascinating to see their own history from this different perspective.Russian-American Dialogue on the American Revolution, standing as the latest and most highly regarded expressions of contemporary Russian scholarship on the American Revolution, will be an invaluable historical resource, as well as engrossing reading for general readers with a special interest in the American-Russian connection.

Review Essay/Historians and Documentary Editing

These four volumes of the Papers of John Adams are major contributions to the third series of the magnificent letterpress edition of The Adams Papers. The first series deals with the diaries of the Adams family. The second series contains the family correspondence. And the third series, of which three volumes of Legal Papers of John Adams have previously been published, includes the nonfamily correspondence, writings, and official papers of the three Adams statesmen featured in The Adams Papers. This third series will presumably be the largest (unless the diaries of John Quincy Adams get out of hand) and the one in which the editors will have to be increasingly rigorous in selecting documents for publication. The launching of the Papers of John Adams thus comes at a propitious moment in the development of historical editing. The Adams Papers have taken on a new chief editor and new members of the editorial crew, who are faced with developing and refining their policies of selectivity. At the same time, they and all historical editors of the various documentary projects have been recently confronted with the most forceful and unnerving critique ever raised against modern historical publication programs. All in all, this is an appropriate occasion to take a brief look at the problems of editing historical documents like those of the Papers of John Adams.

Revolutionary Royalism: A New Paradigm?

In his recent book The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, Eric Nelson provides an ingenious and imaginative argument that aims at nothing less than replacing the present standard interpretation of the constitutional history of the American Revolution with a new one that stresses the Royalist thinking of the major American revolutionaries. Unfortunately, however, Nelson’s account does not uncover any phenomena of which previous historians were unaware, nor does it present a more compelling explanation of the phenomena that it treats. The apparent turn to “Royalism” among American intellectual leaders in the early 1770s is much more plausibly understood as a reaction to assertions of parliamentary sovereignty than as a genuinely held political principle, and the constitutional changes of the 1780s are more plausibly understood as rational responses to the excesses of democracy in the years following the Declaration of Independence than as attempts to revive the royal prerogative.