Volume 3, Number 7 · November 19, 1964
Temptations of the Cultural Historian
By Marius Bewley
O Strange New World American Culture: The Formative Years
by Howard Mumford Jones
Viking, 464 pp., $8.50
Professor Howard Mumford Jones could probably best be described as a cultural historian. That, at any rate, is how he is described on the dust jacket of his recent book, O Strange New World. The chief interest of this book may well lie in certain questions it raises implicitly, and leaves unresolved, about the nature of cultural history itself. I know of no attempt to make a neat and succinct formulation of its problems and goals comparable to the late A. O. Lovejoy's essay on 'The Historiography of Ideas.' No doubt the reason is that the general term cultural history is too broad, and admits of too many approaches, to tolerate a definition or even a description that would be adequately or usefully delimiting. Nevertheless, cultural history demands, even more than political, military, or economic history, a rigorously defined perspective, a firmly held criterion of relevance, and a keenly developed sensibility that has been trained in literature and the arts. Cultural history more than any other kind exercises the creative faculty and makes the heaviest demands on critical discrimination. Scholarship and breadth of erudition are by no means secondary, but they are pointless without these other qualities that can put them effectively to work.
Review, 2165 words
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