Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
Spreading the News
By J.H. Plumb
Slavery and Human Progress
by David Brion Davis
Oxford University Press, 374 pp., $25.00
Since World War II professional history in America has become more sophisticated and analytical, more European, than ever before. The great historians of the Thirties and Forties, Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, Allan Nevins, Garrett Mattingly, and the young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were largely cast in the traditional nineteenth-century mold of narrative historians and biographers. Their works were powerful, informative, often original, and they reached out far beyond the confines of the profession to a wide national audience. Perhaps because America had no medieval history, indeed the United States has little sixteenth-century history, the influence of European scholars such as Henri Pirenne, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and other luminaries of the 'new history' of the Twenties was slow to take root. The slogan of this school, in Febvre's phrase, was, 'No problems, no history.'
Review, 3110 words
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