Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
Reading the Founders' Minds
By Gordon S. Wood
Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution
by Lawrence Goldstone
Walker, 230 pp., $24.00
American Taxation, American Slavery
by Robin L. Einhorn
University of Chicago Press, 337 pp., $35.00
It is a truism that history writing tends to reflect the times in which it is written. All history is 'contemporary history,' wrote the Italian historian Benedetto Croce, by which he meant that history is seen mainly through the eyes of the present and in relation to its problems. The distinguished American historian Bernard Bailyn agrees that history writing is not mere antiquarianism; he is keenly aware of the present's need to relate to the past and the power of that need in stimulating historical inquiry and writing. 'There is always,' he writes, 'a need to extract from the past some kind of bearing on contemporary problems, some message, commentary, or instruction to the writer's age, and to see reflected in the past familiar aspects of the present.' But without 'critical control,' this need, says Bailyn, 'generates an obvious kind of presentism, which at its worst becomes indoctrination by historical example.'[1]
Review, 5148 words
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