Thomas Bender

“Venturesome and Cautious”: American History in the 1990s

The profession, as one respondent observed, is venturesome but cautious. Reading the responses to theJAH survey, especially the answers to the questions that invited brief statements, confirms that characterization. Although there is in the academy today much talk about secularism and post-structuralism, among the American historians represented in this survey the Bible was named more frequently, by a wide margin, than any other book as a major intellectual influence. And the next most cited writings belonged not toJacques Derrida, as readers of Gertrude Himmelfarb, or even Peter Novick, might have suspected, but to Richard Hofstadter and Karl Marx.1 The name of Derrida did not appear at all, and Michel Foucaults books were cited for influence less often than J. R. R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings. If that is amusing, it is disturbing to find only four historians claiming to have been influenced by Max Weber or Sigmund Freud or Hannah Arendt; only three by Marc Bloch; only one by Ruth Benedict, Pierre Bourdieu, or Robert Merton (though three by Thomas Merton); and none by Emile Durkheim, Karl Mannheim, Jurgen Habermas, or Hans-Georg Gadamer.2 It was heartening to discover the considerable influence of W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, and Alexis de Tocqueville (surprising now in a way he would not have been in the 1950s). An impressive list, but not particularly contemporary. Historians need not and ought not chase current fads nor depend upon other disciplines for their ideas. Still, I regret that the responses of American historians did not reveal a fuller engagement with the most advanced transdisciplinary ideas of their own decade and

Clients or citizens

Abstract John McKnights The Careless Society tellingly exposes the ways the professionalized welfare state creates dependency. But McKnight is too quick to condemn this result as the product of professional self‐interest, and to posit as the alternative a selfless, republican model of community. He overlooks the more realistic possibility that the pursuit of their interests by social groups empowered to take care of themselves would better serve those interests, and would simultaneously create a feeling of interdependence and civic responsibility.

Wholes and Parts: Continuing the Conversation

The subtitle of my article -something added by the editors, with my permission, at the page-proof stage, no doubt to introduce the colon required of all academic titles -has better identified the theme of the discussion surrounding the article than has the admittedly opaque original title, with its assumption that there is a conceptual problem before us in relating parts to a whole. Although I certainly meant to urge upon the profession the desirability, both internally and for the problem of the disciplines relation to the larger public culture, of writing more works of a synthetic nature, my major concern was to address some conceptual/structural problems and possibilities inherent in current historiography. How can we turn a vast supply of fine studies of parts, however one defines parts, into a sense of the whole? But the profession is presently so nervous about the very issue of synthesis that defensive responses are more in evidence than engagement with the particularities of the issues associated with the relation of monographs to synthetic work. What has most struck me about the public and private responses to this article, and to my two previous articles taking a similar approach, is how little the problems of conceptualization and practicability (except on ideological grounds) have been raised. In these pages of the Journal ofAmerican History, however, I am fortunate to have critics, especially Professors Richard Fox and Roy Rosenzweig, who have gone well beyond response to engagement.1 If my argument was for synthesis, its principal burden was to specify what might constitute synthesis at the present time in American historical writing. My key words were relational and making, surrounded by the language of public and private as well as wholes and parts. I urged a relational understanding of the way smaller parts of human life work in the making of modern public culture. I presented public culture as a precipitate of historical processes that represents the society as a whole.

THE HISTORIAN AS PUBLIC MORALIST: THE CASE OF CHRISTOPHER LASCH

When I entered graduate school in the fall of 1966, planning to study American intellectual history and perhaps intellectuals specifically, all the talk among the more advanced graduate students was a recently published book, The New Radicalism in America , 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965), by Christopher Lasch. I read it eagerly, but I was not sure what to make of it. The author, Christopher Lasch, offered a very complex analysis of intellectuals’ lives and their social location—or lack of it. It gave as much space to their psychological needs as to their ideas. That seemed to diminish them. Just what did he intend? I wondered.

Metropolitan Culture: Brooklyn Bridge and the Transformation of New York

HE 1880s mark the emergence of a metropolitan conception of society T in the United States. At about the time of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, the United States Bureau of the Census released two fat volumes entitled Social Statistics o f Cities. While primarily compendia of statistics collected for the 1880 census, these volumes, conceived and authorized by New York City reformer George Waring, develop the notion of metropolitanism. There are two aspects of the concept as he presents it. One, which I will not consider here, concerns the way in which a national hierarchy of cities was assuming the role of organizing American social and economic life. The other concerns the internal development of urban places, the extension and specialization that was increasingly giving character to the great cities of the nation, and to New York in particular. There are many dimensions to the emergence of New York City as an example of metropolitan culture, and the Brooklyn Bridge is closely associated with most of them. In this paper, however, I will concentrate on changing perceptions of urban culture. I want to explore changes in the structure of self-perception, changes in the way the city represented its urbanity to itself and to others from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The construction of Brooklyn Bridge falls midway in this long period of American history, and it marks the point when Brooklyn and other non-Manhattan areas became part of the citys self-conception. The Brooklyn Bridge itself, in its iconography, its technology, and its function, provides in fact a particularly rich example and symbol of this process of urban reconfiguration. When one looks at surviving paintings and engravings of late-eighteenth century New York, one finds two related ways in which the city is represented.1 Always the city is understood as a heightened place, a node, within an agrarian and village landscape. In this context it has an economic ex-