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Credible Perspective, Irresistible Narrative, and Coherent Causality

  When eminent historian, James Harvey Robinson, lent his valuable endorsement to a younger colleague’s new textbook aimed at the freshman American History course, his “Editorial Preface” described what he considered to be the attributes of his generation’s “New History.”  Robinson’s views of what history should do might be considered blatant present-ism by many of today’s more conservative scholars. Robinson insisted that “New History,” should not only re-narrate the events of the past, but it should explain how the contemporary world turned out as it has. History is about today (1).  Heather Cox Richardson has written a vivid description of the history of today’s America; along the way she treats us to a compelling argument for focusing first on the Reconstruction era.     

    Before I launch into the traditional quibbling and well deserved gushing, please pardon a moment of self indulgence on the part of this history teacher. To all of my past students of the American History survey, I would like to extend a sincere apology.  In ways that are now clear to me, I have failed you. Please re-enroll in one of your American survey courses and give me one more chance to cover that important period between the Civil War and the turn of the 20^th Century. I can only plead a recently cured deficiency, an inability to find an appropriate monograph to guide me. I suffered from a lack of a fresh analysis of the era, a deficit of synthesis concerning the most recent breakthroughs but one still packaged in engaging presentation. I need such a monograph for every historical period. I can explain.

    My lectures are designed with the goal of keeping real people in the spotlight.  Yes, I learned much from tables and graphs. Demographic evidence, economic arguments, and election results have changed the way I think about American History. But when I drift back to what interested me in the first place and indeed, what keeps me involved in American History now, the answer hovers over the stories of real people in their accurate situations.

As in any William Faulkner novel, one secret to narration concerns the veracity of perspective. So when I stand in front of a sixty-student section of American History, the lectures are virtually extracts of those wonderful narratives that have excited me over the years: Try as I might, my telling of the story of European exploration is but an abbreviated version of David B. Quinn’s North America (2). Likewise, what better glimpse into the English colonial period exists than through the eyes of Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin? (3) My top students realize that you can get a much better version of my American Revolution lecture by reading Robert A. Gross and Wayne Bodle in their unadulterated forms. (4)  Gary Nash has carried more of my students through the early national period than I should ever admit in public. (5) Then, a favorite recent micro-history of an idea (anti-slavery), and how it was injected into a philosophical movement by a community of activists, nicely shepherds my classes through the antebellum era. After that, a tiny bit of Shelby Foote works its way, uninvited, into every Civil War lecture.  Then, I transition from the triumphant blue waves to a topic more intellectual with a detour into J. David Hoeveler’s, The Evolutionists. (6)  Unfortunately for all of my past students, my lectures then tunnel directly through mountains of sectional election results, impeachment proceedings, business cycle expansions, and constitutional amendments.

 Reconstruction, for me, had been a story largely of the South’s refusal to come to terms with “race,” and a nation that inexcusably just stopped trying to force the issue.  I have learned to hand out my student evaluation forms shortly after “Pickett’s charge,” because once we depart from the story of individual people students understandably fade into their concerns for the final exam. “Yes, of course it will be an essay exam, this is a history class. Now, are there any other questions about the Andrew Johnson administration?”

    But I am through with all of that now. Henceforth, I will begin my last civil war lecture with Ulysses S. Grant’s horrible headache on April 9, 1865.  Readers of Heather Cox Richardson’s West from Appomattox: the Reconstruction of America after the Civil War are treated to an ample portion of real people in their actual historical situations. But these individual stories are not bundled; Richardson’s project was not to write multiple biographies to help history teachers. She creates a single coherent narrative history of the period from the end of the Civil War until the Progressive Party won the showdown at the national rodeo. Much of the book’s coherence comes from an authorial respect for preserving the perspectives of these people, not only characters in her drama, but also witnesses.

    Confederate General Wade Hampton’s retrospective viewpoints on the war and his meaning of American society are preserved here; Richardson does not sit in judgment but helps readers understand a southern elite. The tale of the dynamic character, Nat Love, will choke even a stoic. Love enters the drama as a plantation slave, who would learn that “freedom” could mean very little difference for those freed slaves who stay and work for a previous master. Love, like the focus of Richardson’s monograph, departs the South and heads to the opportunities out West. The rest of Love’s story is too good for a reviewer’s preemption. You will be glad that I restrained myself!

    West from Appomattox brims with engaging stories of real people. The book would be a worthwhile read if this were all that it offered. But the author’s central argument--that much of today’s socio-political situation took its embryonic shape during Reconstruction--dominated my thinking, disrupted an otherwise perfect vacation, and offered my predispositions many a hearty thumping. Typically among the skeptical, I usually have difficulty with arguments that seek ultimate sources in particular historic events or generations. But Richardson’s light-handed prose and her tenacious presentation of evidence may have prevailed. More and more, I see around me the later nineteenth century: cowboys, freedmen (and politically active and prolific women) war profiteers, needed immigrants, nation builders masquerading as missionaries, and the red state / blue state polarization with its schizophrenic policy implications. Moreover, even the best of our latest version of “New History” retains--over recent objections--what Robinson would have recognized in 1911, history that explains today. 

The above review was contributed by: Joe Petrulionis:   Joe reads, writes, and teaches the history of ideas and he emphasizes the political and cultural context in which these philosophical, scientific, and artistic notions emerge. Joe has a recent Masters Degree in History and is in recovery from a previous career and graduate specialty in finance and economics. To read more of Joe's reviews CLICK HERE

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(1) James Harvey Robinson, “Editorial Preface” in David Saville Muzzey An American History (Boston: Ginn, 1911).

(2) David Beers Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

(3) Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938).

(4) Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), Wayne Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

(5) See for example, Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

(6) J. David Hoeveler, The Evolutionists: American Thinkers Confront Charles Darwin, 1860-1920 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).