Day By Day

Sunday, June 05, 2005

American History in a Post-9/11 World -- Forgetting the Founders?

Barry Gewen has a pretty standard, if highly selective [he seems never to have heard of Gipson and Beer], piece in the NYT on American historiography. It's worth a look, even if it's highly prejudiced. He denigates the idea of American exceptionalism and the recent trend toward writing books that people might actually want to read, and plumps instead for the latest fad, transnational history (and especially "Atlantic" history), arguing that it is the only form appropriate to a post-9/11 world.

For me the most interesting part of the article was the admission, on the pages of the NYT, that FDR's economic policies were only "modestly" successful. That's quite a turnaround for a bastion of Galbraithian liberalism and probably as much honesty as we can expect from it.

Oh, and by the way..., transnational history is so 90s!

Read it here.

UPDATE: Gotta love the bloggers. They've already organized a symposium on Gewen's article over at Cliopatria. If you want to see how history pros react to this sort of thing check it out here.

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