Volume 49, Number 3 · February 28, 2002
Wise Man
By George M. Fredrickson
Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture
by John Higham, edited by Carl J. Guarneri
Yale University Press, 315 pp., $35.00
Specialization on increasingly narrow subjects is the dominant trend in American historical scholarship. Rarer and rarer, at least in the academy, are generalists dealing with broad stretches of the past or souls who work in more than one of the usual specialties or move readily from one to another. The new 'micro-history' is less concerned with making connections and establishing general patterns than with recapturing the experiences and appreciating the achievements of those who were overlooked by previous generations of historians. Recording the doings of elite white males has taken a back seat to accounts of marginalized groups—women, African-Americans, Latinos, low-skilled workers, and poor people generally. Much of value has come from social and cultural history 'from the bottom up,' but it has deprived us of a unifying vision of the nation's past across the divides of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.
Review, 4048 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |