Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society.(Review)

Reconstructing History: The Emergence Of a New Historical Society, ed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. New York: Routledge, 1999, 399 pp., $21.99 paperback.

In May 1998, a group of distinguished historians announced the creation of a new organization: The Historical Society. Led by Eugene D. Genovese, the Society offered an alternative to those weary of the leftist ideology that had dominated the historical profession for some three decades. Race, class, and gender, by this time, had virtually excluded all other topics of discussion in journals and at historical meetings, while diplomatic, intellectual, political, and economic studies were barely tolerated. Meetings featured and journals published the likes of "Constructing Menstruation" and "A Dual-Gendered Perspective on Eighteenth Century Advice and Behavior." To speak of the existence of "historical truth" was considered naive. Ideological conformity was often a prerequisite for promotion, tenure, job advancement, and holding office in professional organizations. The intellectual atmosphere, Genovese wrote, resembled that of the Joe McCarthy years. In short, the imperative for founding The Historical Society matched the earlier need, on a broader scale, for the National Association of Scholars.

Critics, of course, charged immediately that the Society was conservative. (Is there anything more repellent to most academics, at least in the liberal arts and social sciences, than the "C" word?) Genovese countered by noting that people of all political and religious persuasions were welcome, that leadership in the organization "includes blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights," and by declaring, "all we ask of our members is that they lay down plausible premises; reason logically; appeal to evidence; and respect the integrity of all those who do the same." The restoration of civilized, scholarly debate was at the heart of The Historical Society. As Alan Charles Kors put it in the book under review, "If history as a discipline can offer anything to the world, it can offer that sense of the value of open-mindedness, competing interpretations, and intense debate in the pursuit of knowledge about the human past."

Reconstructing History is the Society's first book. In it we see proof of the founders' contention that there is much diversity within the Society and that scholarship is more important to members than ideology. While a few of the authors are conservatives, most cannot be so conveniently labeled. Indeed, several of the essays might well rile many on the right. Authors include Genovese, Marc Trachtenberg, Alan Charles Kors, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Leo P. Ribuffo, Donald Kagan, Diane Ravitch, John Patrick Diggins, Walter A. McDougall, Martin J. Sklar, John Womack, and both of the volume's editors.

There are twenty-five essays, divided into five categories: "The Imperative: The Historical Society as a Critique and a New Ideal," "History and the Contemporary Intellectual Milieu," "Meditations on the Practice of History," "An Educational Mission: Standards for the Teaching of History," and "Historians at Work." A few of the essays have been published and presented elsewhere. Common to all but two or three of them is an extraordinarily high level of clarity, scholarship, and sound reasoning.

Gertrude Himmelfarb's essay on Postmodernist History, from her 1994 book On Looking into the Abyss, is especially rewarding. It covers literature, philosophy, and law, as well as history, and points to authors who are attempting to strip all objective knowledge from these disciplines. She quotes Hayden White, for example, who contends, "We require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot." Himmelfarb also notes the major role of feminists in postmodernism, scholars who claim that "logic, reason, and coherence ... are themselves expressive of a patriarchal ideology" and therefore must be discarded. Himmelfarb concludes, "Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide."

Another of the best of these essays is by Deborah A. Symonds of Drake University. She contributes a stimulating piece on working in primary sources ...