The story of popular historical writing since the middle of the twentieth century is often told as a narrative of decline: there were giants on the earth in those days, but now academic historians have forsaken their responsibility to write for a broader public, which in any case doesn’t really care what they have to say. Back in the golden days, or so the story goes, great scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward could make field-defining contributions—such as Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945), Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) and Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)—that also crackled with energy, reached a wide audience and informed public debates. But since the 1960s, academic historians have splintered into narrow subfields that speak only to one another in increasingly esoteric jargon, while the public has become incurious and incapable of reading anything longer than a few paragraphs. Popular history has come to mean political biography and military history, two fields that academic historians often avoid or even disdain.
This story is obviously a caricature. Like all caricatures it gets certain major features right, albeit in exaggerated or distorted form. It also leaves a lot out—not only the details that would bring our gauzy image of the golden days into sharper focus, but also a better sense of what popular history actually looks like today. Because history remains popular. As I write, in the spring of 2024, Erik Larson’s new book about the start of the Civil War, The Demon of Unrest, is the bestselling nonfiction book in the country, while David Grann’s The Wager, about an eighteenth-century shipwreck, has consistently ranked in the top fifteen for more than a year. These are particularly fine examples of a certain genre of history—heavy on character and plot, somewhat lighter on analysis—that is perennially popular and, in the hands of a Larson or a Grann, can be quite rewarding.
But I want to think about a different kind of popular history. What books by writers like Larson and Grann don’t offer, at least not usually, is a broader interpretation of the world, a new perspective on the past that also leads to a new understanding of the present, something that is accessible to a reasonably broad public and offers at least the potential to rearrange a reader’s mental furniture. That, or something like it, is what people mean when they refer with nostalgia to the mid-century moment of Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward.
This kind of serious but popular history does still exist. Our most well-known academic historian in this mode is probably Jill Lepore, the Harvard professor whose snappy essays in the New Yorker have won her a large and admiring readership for the way they put a human face on the historical antecedents of our own time. Yet if Lepore represents the liberal center, the driving force of contemporary interest in history has been the challenges we have seen to the liberal order from the left and the right, symbolized originally by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and more recently by Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter—challenges that have sent readers searching through the past for lessons about revolution, capitalism, fascism, racism and liberalism itself.
As a result, serious popular history of this sort may be more influential today than it has been in some time. There is, for example, a thriving cottage industry of historians and political scientists debating whether and to what extent Donald Trump is a fascist, and otherwise offering historical comparisons and analogies, usually to the Civil War or to interwar Europe. Perhaps the most popular of the historians who promise to help us understand the Trump era is the Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has accumulated an astonishing 1.5 million subscribers on Substack. Richardson’s daily newsletter Letters from an American places current events (often Trump’s trials and tribulations) in historical context, while her recent book Democracy Awakening opens with none other than Adolf Hitler.
Meanwhile, as interest in the history of American racism surged alongside the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning won a National Book Award and became a bestseller by promising nothing less than “the definitive history of racist ideas in America.” Similarly, the 1619 Project, the New York Times Magazine’s exploration of how slavery and race have shaped American life, sold out newsstands when it first appeared in August 2019. It also spawned a host of spin-offs, including a television series and a high school curriculum; the expanded book version of the project sat on the bestseller list for months after it was published in 2021.
More than any other work of history in recent memory, the 1619 Project provoked wide-ranging debates across American culture and within the historical profession, including an eighty-page forum in the American Historical Review. “There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude,” the editors noted. They believed that the 1619 Project merited the attention because it had prompted such heated and important debates about “the work history does in the world.” But what is that work? Neither the editors nor the essays that followed did much to clarify its nature. In broader public discussions it often seems to be taken for granted that history, and historians, can help us to understand the problems we face. But this consensus obscures deep disagreements about what that help should look like. So it is worth asking: What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?
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Any attempt to examine these questions about the role of history in public life will itself turn inevitably to the past. In the United States, the tradition of historians who have engaged in public debates goes back through Charles Beard in the early twentieth century and George Bancroft in the nineteenth century all the way to David Ramsay, the earliest historian of the republic. A physician based in Charleston, Ramsay delivered one of the first Independence Day orations, in 1778, and then, while being held at a British prisoner-of-war camp in St. Augustine, resolved to write a history of the revolution. Later elected to the dysfunctional Confederation Congress in the 1780s, Ramsay did research in the records of the congressional secretary while waiting (often in vain) for a quorum to convene. That experience convinced him that the fledgling country needed a new start with a stronger national government, and in 1788 he served in the South Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution. Then he completed his most important work, his two-volume History of the American Revolution, with the Constitution as its culmination, and published it the following year, just as the new government was getting under way. His history of the republic was also an argument for it.
Historians like Ramsay and Bancroft—who served in government as Secretary of the Navy under James Polk—have plenty to teach us about the potential conflicts between politics and scholarship. But they were essentially gentleman amateurs (even though Bancroft held a German Ph.D.) who lived in a world defined by very different academic and intellectual institutions. Our current model for serious popular history dates, instead, to the period after World War II, when the rapid expansion of higher education, and of the market for history, produced that golden age of books that we now hold up as paragons of the genre. Writing about this period in his recent book Popularizing the Past, the historian Nick Witham shows how the paperback revolution in publishing, the democratization of culture and the self-examination that accompanied America’s global power after World War II all fostered a cultural environment in which large numbers of Americans looked to serious historical scholarship to help them understand their world.
The story starts in the tumultuous two decades before the war, a period when a series of unprecedented crises presented social scientists—including historians—with an opportunity to prove their worth in solving complex social problems. Academic expertise remained influential through the early part of the Cold War, in part because of the contest for the hearts and minds of the Third World, which led to an explosion of growth in area-studies programs on Africa, Asia and Latin America.
But Americans did not only feel a strategic imperative to understand other peoples; they also wanted to better understand themselves. The United States had emerged from World War II as a dominant power and the leader of the free world at the same time as the country was busy incorporating millions of second-generation European immigrants. Americans understandably developed some self-consciousness about their own character and culture, and about the kind of democratic institutions and ideals they were working to export abroad. More than a dozen new programs in American studies started in the first academic year after the war, and Western Civ became a required course at many colleges. The number of annual incoming students tripled from 1950 to the early 1970s, while the total undergraduate population increased fivefold.
This growth rode the wave of the baby boom but can’t be reduced solely to demography. Instead, the popularity of higher education resulted from the broader postwar belief in experts as respected authorities, and in knowledge as an aspirational ideal. Americans who were looking for meaning and understanding believed those things could be found in college, especially in the liberal arts.
The expansion of American higher education and the popularity of the humanities had an effect on faculty too. With the number of teaching jobs growing throughout the postwar period (the membership of the American Historical Association increased by a factor of five from 1940 to 1970), the prospect of making an independent living as a writer declined. As in the field of creative writing, which followed a parallel trajectory, work that once would have been carried on outside the university was now conducted on campus. “Never before,” the historian David Hollinger has written, “had so great a proportion of the intellectual history of the United States played itself out within the academic humanities.”
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These intellectual and institutional circumstances were necessary but not sufficient for the rise of academic popular history in the postwar period. To achieve popularity, a book needs to be interesting and fun to read. Most academic history books, even good ones, are not. Academic historians are often mocked as horrible writers, but that’s not quite right, at least not on a sentence-by-sentence level. The problem is less that academic history books are poorly written than that they are overwritten, their paragraphs packed so full of evidence that there is no forward momentum, their stories outlined so completely in the introduction that no mystery and no suspense remain.
Popular postwar historians like Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward did not write like that. The reason is simple: they were not primarily historians. They thought of themselves as writers first, with history simply supplying their subject. “I am really a suppressed litterateur who couldn’t make the grade just writing good prose and had to go into history,” Hofstadter once admitted. Woodward, meanwhile, saw himself as part of the Southern Literary Renaissance—Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren. He got his Ph.D. largely because he needed the funding that came with a graduate fellowship, and then he committed himself to the academy only when his first book was a commercial failure. Even Schlesinger, the son of a prominent Harvard historian by the same name, nevertheless took his writing cues from a set of mid-century models that included Bernard DeVoto, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy.
Eventually all these writers turned to history, and departments were expanding so rapidly in the postwar years that they were able to find a place in the academy. Still, they kept their writerly commitments—and, just as important, their interest in the wider world. Woodward cultivated friendships with novelists such as Warren and William Styron; Hofstadter learned from the sociologists C. Wright Mills, David Riesman and Robert Merton; and Schlesinger always kept at least one foot (sometimes two) planted in professional politics.
Engaged with the world as they were, these scholars wanted to think in conversation with society rather than lecturing it from a distance. In retrospect, one thing that is striking in the work of Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward is their willingness to write about the history and the problems of their own time. In addition to applying historical analysis to the present, the mid-century historians also achieved popularity by writing in the mode of creative synthesis, not archival spadework. “In my view,” Hofstadter once wrote, “a little insight is worth a great deal of research; and a lot of insight … is worth tons of research.” They assembled their books not just from arguments and evidence, as academics usually do, but from story and character, irony and tragedy, suggestion and subtlety. They framed the stakes in human terms, emphasizing the moral and political implications as much as, if not more than, historiographical interventions. Instead of grinding their story to a halt to tell readers about the multiple contexts in which a subject operated, they showed people moving through the world and encountering obstacles and opportunities along the way.
But perhaps the main thing that made this generation of historians popular, and that gave their work some staying power, was their willingness to subject the United States to a critical reexamination at a time of intense pro-American propaganda and political pressure. In The American Political Tradition, Hofstadter lamented the “overpowering nostalgia” and “spirit of sentimental appreciation” that had characterized American attitudes toward the past during the Depression and World War II. Advocating instead for “critical analysis,” he famously claimed that the United States was “a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity,” its political culture consisting of a series of minor quarrels among politicians who all shared a commitment to capitalism and private property. Such sweeping, critical claims about American history helped give readers a fresh perspective not only on the past, but also on the politics and leaders of their own time.
Hofstadter recognized that there was always a gap—sometimes ironic, sometimes tragic—between ideology and reality. Indeed, looking back at The American Political Tradition today, the chief thing that stands out is its attention to irony and paradox. The whole book amounted to a serious of vigorous and often humorous reinterpretations of American political figures who had, in many cases, become mute caricatures. Yet while Hofstadter’s judgments were lively and sharp, they were not mean-spirited; even as he lamented some ideas and developments, he showed them a wry respect. For example, he described Grover Cleveland as “the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age” because “out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician might have sold them for a price.” Hofstadter’s cynicism was balanced by his interest in teasing out how these men might have thought about their own actions and commitments.
In his next book, The Age of Reform (1955), Hofstadter proved especially adept in his use of social psychology, analyzing the status anxieties and grievances that he saw animating the reform activities of earlier generations of Populists and Progressives, and the functions that ideas about responsibility and guilt played in their worldview. Hofstadter himself had grown up in the reform tradition and valued its many achievements, but he was not looking for heroes. “I have found much that was retrograde and delusive, a little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic,” he noted. He recognized the irony that in banding together to defend individualistic values, the reformers had brought themselves “closer to the techniques of organization they feared,” and that in trying to save individualism from big business they had ended up creating the kind of big government they might have deplored. This was something new, full of nuance and complexity, unconscious motives and unintended consequences—it had the suspense and psychological insight of a good novel.
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The final element that elevated the mid-century historians to unprecedented popularity and influence was the political turmoil of the 1960s, the civil rights movement and Vietnam above all, when the virtues of American democracy came in for a fresh round of questioning. In a single decade, the annual number of graduates who majored in humanities tripled, as did graduate-school enrollments in those subjects, as Americans turned to the past to understand the roots of the country’s problems. The biggest beneficiaries of this surge of interest in history were the relatively small number of liberal, egalitarian and also readable books about slavery and race, which were suddenly seen as essential to understanding America.
Chief among these was Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The book was published less than a year after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school-desegregation case, in May 1954. Woodward, who was then a prominent Southern historian at Johns Hopkins University, had been invited to deliver an important series of lectures at the University of Virginia that fall. In the wake of the Brown decision, he took aim at the notion, widespread among white Southerners and many others, that segregation was the natural, inevitable and only peaceful means of regulating racial relations. This idea propped up segregation by warning of the chaos that would accompany its eradication. Woodward thought it was based on bad history. Far from a natural or immutable system dating to time immemorial, he showed, Jim Crow had been implemented in Southern legal codes scarcely two generations before.
Throughout the postwar period, Woodward worried that Southern resistance to civil rights would tie Southern identity irrevocably to segregation. “If this definition is allowed to prevail,” he believed, “it will be an evil day for the Southern heritage.” In contrast, the whole thrust of his scholarship was to show that the region, even its white residents, had almost always contained significant internal conflicts over the questions of civil rights and racial equality. As the South debated those issues once again, Woodward saw the region as perched precariously between past and future. “We can either move forward,” he would later declare, “or, as we have in the past, turn backward. … This is our last best hope to deal with an ancient problem in a manner of which we can be proud.”
Woodward’s Virginia lectures were an attempt to push the region forward. They proved to be a great success, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds. Oxford University Press rushed them into print the following spring, going almost straight from speaking notes to bound volumes. This left the book a little light, subject to significant criticism from historians and misinterpretation by the public, but it did nothing to harm sales, especially after Oxford put out a paperback edition in 1957. Soon the press was doing reprints every six months, and as the civil rights movement gained steam, in the early 1960s, Americans began buying tens of thousands of copies per year. At the Selma march in the spring of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. cited The Strange Career and Woodward himself (who was at the march) for his claim that “racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War” but was imposed later as “a political stratagem … to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.”
By that time, the civil rights movement and the expansion of American higher education had pushed sales of Woodward’s book to forty thousand per year; similarly gaudy figures litter the letters of many prominent American historians at the time. Thanks in large part to the book’s success, Woodward ascended to the status of “America’s historian,” according to a recent biography, and became the country’s historical conscience, too, using the remainder of his long career to reflect on the relationship between identity, history and myth in America. He saw the work of history as “the critique of myths,” not the embodiment or destruction of them. The goal, he said, should be to make it possible for intelligent Americans to “speak of the myth of equality without self-consciousness or cynicism, and embrace it without striking the pose of a defiant Jacksonian of the 1830s.” Similarly, Westerners ought to be able “to cherish and preserve frontier values without assuming the role of a Davy Crockett.” He even held out hope that Southerners could “salvage some of the aristocratic heritage without wallowing in the Plantation Legend.”
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The cultural position of history, and of college, soon changed. The expansion of American higher education in the postwar period may have made academic popular history possible by providing an eager audience—even a captive audience, when it came to classroom assignments—but it also promoted an inward turn on the part of academics. As the historical profession grew and funding improved, it became easier for historians and other academics to write only for one another. Not only easier, but in many cases imperative, since hiring and tenure were beginning already by the 1950s to be based more on scholarship than on teaching or sociability, a change that was later cemented with the rise of anti-discrimination measures—and the new hiring practices they required—in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The pursuit of scholarship displaced the provision of a liberal education as the main mission of many institutions, which dropped Western Civ and other core courses in favor of a distribution requirement better suited to faculty specialization.
Meanwhile, colleges confronted the leading edge of what has now become a long-term crisis. In 1975, enrollments fell for the first time in a generation. At the same time, double-digit inflation rates meant the real value of federal and state appropriations for education also fell, as did the real value of tuition payments. The crunch was felt most keenly at public institutions, but even wealthy private schools were squeezed. The crisis eased in the 1980s, thanks in part to the expansion of medical research and the rise in revenues from university health centers, but its legacy was a decisive shift toward privatization and entrepreneurialism in academic life.
Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, the percentage of undergraduates majoring in history tumbled by nearly two-thirds, while faculty hiring stalled and the production of history Ph.D.s fell by half. With fewer students stepping foot in a college history course, and historians increasingly writing specialized studies, a gap opened between academic and popular understandings of American history. This gap was exacerbated by the shifting tone of scholarship, which had an effect even on those few history books that did succeed in reaching larger audiences. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) remains perhaps the most influential example of the change. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate and the perceived shortcomings of the civil rights movement, left-leaning academics like Zinn showed skepticism bordering on contempt toward the kind of optimistic narratives that often guided public interpretations, instead emphasizing the darker features of the American story: dispossession, struggle and enslavement.
Woodward soon observed that “a seller’s market for guilt” had grown up, one whose “bargains … are to be found mainly in the past.” As Woodward himself knew, plenty of earlier historians had written about historical crimes and transgressions. But he thought those earlier generations, including his own, had been careful to assign specific evils to specific agents (slaveholders, frontiersmen, political bosses, big businessmen and so on). “The new guilt is different,” he believed. “It is something congenital, inherent, intrinsic, collective, something possibly inexpiable, and probably ineradicable.” It confused history with genetics, drawing a straight line from the Pequot War to My Lai and turning American history into a nonstop story of oppression.
Throughout this period, academic historians felt themselves to be in a fog of confusion. They continued to do solid work, and they celebrated the proliferation of scholarship on a growing array of topics, but they could no longer articulate the point of it all. “The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” lamented the president of the American Historical Association in 1986. Scholars wrote a series of interminable articles calling for a new narrative synthesis of American history.
And then something surprising happened: historians actually did it. They took the new scholarship that had accumulated since the 1960s and responded to the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s—which demonstrated the dire consequences of the growing gap between academic and popular understandings of history—by writing a remarkable string of accessible narrative histories over the next two decades: Eric Foner’s Reconstruction (1988), James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution (1991), Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick’s The Age of Federalism (1993), James Patterson’s Grand Expectations (1996), Foner’s The Story of American Freedom (1998), Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone (1998), David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear (1999), Alan Taylor’s American Colonies (2001), Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001), Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy (2005), David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage (2006), Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan (2008) and Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation (2009), plus several mammoth biographies that doubled as sterling histories of American politics and society, including David Levering Lewis’s two volumes on W. E. B. Du Bois (1993-2000), Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years trilogy (1988-2006), a couple of key volumes of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson saga (1990, 2002) and Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello (2008).
Taken collectively, these books told the whole story of the United States from the colonial period to the present, defying the conventional wisdom that professional historians spurned synthesis, narrative or the reading public in these decades. Thanks to the proliferation of new fields of scholarship over the previous generation, the books had a striking breadth, and a healthy sense of American hypocrisies and failures, yet in this post-Cold War moment their authors remained convinced that there were certain things about America that were distinctive, and that at least some of those things—above all the pragmatisms, pluralisms and freedoms with which Menand’s Metaphysical Club culminated—were worthwhile. To the extent that they had a common theme, it was that disagreements defined American democracy. The “story” of American freedom, according to Foner, was “a tale of debates, disagreements, and struggles,” while Wilentz saw American democracy as “the spectacle of Americans arguing over democracy.” One of the lessons of the pragmatists in Menand’s Metaphysical Club was that “since we can never be certain we must tolerate dissent.” If this did not amount to an enduring concept like Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” or Schlesinger’s “imperial presidency,” or to a direct intervention like Woodward’s history of Jim Crow, it seemed to herald a new synthesis of American history that would be able to incorporate proliferating subfields and struggles by folding those conflicts into a broader liberal consensus, one that acknowledged deep and even violent divisions while also arguing that those divisions took place within, and were largely about, the nature and limits of freedom, democracy and liberalism.
Yet even though some of these books won major prizes and sold very well, it would be hard to argue that they had the same cultural influence as their predecessors in the postwar period. The world had changed. Enrollments in history courses had continued to decline, to the point that academic historians began to work more actively with historic sites and museums as a way of ensuring that their scholarship made its way before the public. Meanwhile, many Americans in the wake of the Cold War embraced what the historian Timothy Snyder has called “the politics of inevitability,” embodied most indelibly in the title of Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?” During the Cold War, with the conflict between capitalism and communism unresolved, history had served a purpose in informing an uncertain future that could not be assumed to be inevitable. But with that conflict at an end, and with liberal capitalism seemingly ascendant across the globe, the future now seemed fixed—and the past, therefore, irrelevant. A neoliberal consensus unmoored from custom or community—that is, from history—took hold. To the extent that the past remained relevant, it was primarily to leftists. With the collapse of communism, however, they no longer saw the past as prelude to a utopian future; instead, it could serve only as the source of the dystopian present.
Then the end of history came to an end. Or at least that is how it felt to many professors in a period defined by the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis. Convinced of the widespread incompetence, if not outright malice, of American leaders, many of the scholars who entered the academy in these years drifted even further to the left than the generations that had come before them. With the rise of the Tea Party, which drew its identity in part from a simplistic, sanitized version of the American Revolution, some historians responded with books that took on a lecturing tone, and that focused instead on the revolution’s violence and failures. They often seemed to question—at least implicitly—whether the public had the right to form its own opinions about history outside the purview of professionals. Over the next few years, following a string of widely publicized incidents of brutality against black people, scholars cohered more than ever, according to the historian Roger Geiger, “around disidentification with America and its past.”
A generation earlier, in the previous round of culture wars, the battles over American history ultimately died away because almost everyone involved still agreed that the American story was fundamentally a story about the promise of freedom, even as they disagreed over whether and when that promise had been achieved. By the 2010s, that had changed. Some maintained that American history was defined by freedom and opportunity, but many others contended it was nothing but slavery and oppression. The election of Donald Trump, whose successful 2016 presidential campaign was built on a desire to return the United States to a supposedly better past, drew the lines even more sharply. Public debates became pitched battles in which any conscientious objectors were quickly cast as opponents, and competing accounts of America’s past became freighted with an almost unbearable political burden.
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One major role of the humanities, in addition to enabling us to understand ourselves, must surely be to open our minds to lives and perspectives that are very different from our own. It should come as no surprise, then, that the ongoing half-century decline in humanistic education, which has only accelerated in the past fifteen years, has been accompanied by a striking decrease in our ability to understand ideas that diverge significantly from our own, or to imagine ourselves in the position of the people who hold them. Sometimes it seems as if we no longer believe in the possibility of such an act.
Contemporary academic historians who aim to influence public debate often make the problem worse. In the postwar period, Hofstadter could criticize the reform movements that shaped his own political education, while Woodward could express sympathy for both civil rights activists and aristocratic slaveholders. In contrast, historians today are more apt to take sides with their historical heroes lest they give any comfort to their present-day enemies. Often in their books you see a neat division of the past into two teams, such that history becomes little more than a spectator sport. In Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, you are invited to root for team antiracist against team racist; in Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening, you cheer good progressives and minorities fighting against bigoted conservatives and rapacious businessmen.
In the work of these authors, the people whom they supposedly care about are too often depicted as passive creatures who would choose correctly (that is, support civil rights and gun control and national health care) if only they weren’t being hoodwinked and manipulated by nefarious forces beyond their control. If only everyone knew the correct story of American history—namely, the story told in these books—then they would all see the light and be proper liberals. The books often lack any acknowledgment that people of good faith might hold conflicting ideas about the story of American history or that, even if they agree about the basic story, they might draw starkly different lessons from it.
A few recent books show what serious popular history can still offer today. Instead of the Manichaean divisions and determinism that characterize recent popular books on race such as Stamped from the Beginning and The 1619 Project, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement (2023) focuses on daily courtroom dramas dating back to the antebellum era to show American law as a force not only of oppression but also of opportunity, and black history as a complicated dance of racist ideas, universalist principles, material interests and practical realities. Meanwhile, in contrast to the kind of takes on recent American political history that do little more than blame conservatives or neoliberals for our problems, Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022) shows how and why the set of principles that we call neoliberalism (free trade, porous borders, deregulation, globalization) took shape in the decades after the New Deal, what happened when they dominated the political scene in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally why they have run aground in the 2000s and 2010s.
Gerstle’s book is helpful for illuminating why the current moment feels so perilous, and also so rich with potential. In that way, it offers an antidote to the Trump-fascism debate that has deadened certain corners of our historical and political discourse for the past eight years. As the intellectual historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has observed, that debate has been driven by “anxieties about the kind of politics that are replacing the old order of things, and the human tendency to fall back on stale historical analogies to grasp the booming buzzing confusion of the present.” Sadly, stale analogies and bland comparisons are among the better products of this discourse, in which history has either functioned as a form of escapist entertainment or been refashioned for the purposes of cut-rate political commentary. Such attempts to put history to popular use risk undermining the authority of historians by pretending that their expertise affords them special insight into contemporary electoral politics—a phenomenon well described by William Hogeland in a recent essay on the “Age of the Resistance Historian”—while simultaneously occluding from readers the ways in which ordinary people continue to have power and agency in the present.
The purpose of serious popular history should be to make people more self-conscious about their society, to unearth its underlying values and assumptions and to show how past events, in all their contingency and subterranean logic, managed to produce the world we live in today. With the neoliberal order having come to an end, we are at a moment when the meaning of American society is up for grabs in a way that it hasn’t been since the late 1960s and 1970s. It was in that earlier period when many of the writers we think of as the great postwar historians—Hofstadter and Woodward above all—sold tens of thousands of books a year, helping Americans make sense of who they were and what they wanted their society to be. Particularly with the 250th anniversary of independence arriving soon, we may be entering a similar period today.
With that in mind, it’s worth looking ahead to a more hopeful project, still in progress, from the Princeton historian Matthew Karp. Like the popular mid-century historians, Karp’s political and historical outlook was forged by a few searing experiences in young adulthood: America’s failed adventure in Iraq, which shaped the questions he asked in his first book (a look at the expansive foreign policy of another group of conservatives, the slaveholders of the Old South), and then the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, which turned him from a liberal into a Marx-quoting Democratic Socialist. “I was really swept away by the ideas and the energy behind that campaign in 2016,” he later recalled. “It felt distinct from anything I had experienced in my life not just in terms of what the campaign stood for, but the extent to which it felt like it had developed a mass base for what it was fighting for.”
In addition to his day job as a historian at Princeton, Karp became a contributing editor at Jacobin, where he has been a sharp analyst of election returns. In contrast to historians who merely pretend that their expertise affords special insight into contemporary electoral politics, Karp has actually put in the work. His chief concern has been what is known as “class dealignment,” with upper-class voters now breaking more Democratic while lower-class voters trend Republican. Karp has prodded his readers to honestly grapple with this phenomenon precisely because it poses such a deep challenge to his preferred form of class-based politics, at least insofar as that project might be pursued through the current Democratic Party. Refreshingly, he does not regard the mass of American workers as former or future fascists, but instead as voters who, just like the rest of us, can be won over with better politics and policies. “Underneath the partisan fear and loathing,” he wrote in his first Easy Chair column for Harper’s, published in June of this year, “‘a wide and arduous national life’ still murmurs on, linking city and countryside, crossing lines of race, gender, and culture, waiting to take hold in our politics.” The column used the novels of George Eliot to suggest some of the moral and political limitations of the typical urban Democrat’s condescending attitude toward rural workers.
For his next project, Karp is looking at the greatest example in American history of a political party that assembled a winning coalition around radical class politics: the Republican Party of the 1850s, which managed to go in six short years from nonexistence to control of the federal government by rallying Northern farmers and workers around the politics of anti-slavery. Karp published the first overview of his new research in 2019, just as the presidential campaigns were gearing up, in Jacobin and its more scholarly companion Catalyst. The piece made no present-day comparisons, but it did note that slaveholders in the 1850s made up only one percent of the American population and that the Republicans were successful in overthrowing their power and completely reorienting the policies of the federal government precisely by “building a mass movement to overthrow a ruling-class oligarchy.” “The Republican achievement in the 1850s,” he declared, “was not to isolate moral, cultural, or economic arguments against slavery, but to combine them into a compelling and victorious whole.”
Here, in other words, was a road map for radical movements today, a precursor that people could be proud of and from which they might take some inspiration. Notice that this does not require Karp to whitewash the past or to pretend its arc has always been progressive. More historians might follow his example of reminding readers that American history is at heart not a Manichean tale of good versus bad, or a deterministic tale based on some original sin, but a story of real people struggling to make moral and political decisions in a complex world. Perhaps then more of us would realize that we can exercise a similar agency and responsibility, humor and hope, in the choices we make in our own lives.
This is, and has always been, part of the promise of America—the promise that our inheritance need not define our experience, and that even as we rely on the past for our models we might also begin the world anew. The past can be instructive and informative, but it is not determinative; it surely constrains, but it doesn’t coerce. History can tell us something about who we are and where we have been, but it cannot tell us everything. At its best, it does not consign the story of the present either to epilogue or to tautology, but rather prepares us to appreciate the irony, the unpredictability and the unforeseen possibilities of the chapter we are writing for ourselves.
Art credit: Paco Pomet, Babel, 2017. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 130 × 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
The story of popular historical writing since the middle of the twentieth century is often told as a narrative of decline: there were giants on the earth in those days, but now academic historians have forsaken their responsibility to write for a broader public, which in any case doesn’t really care what they have to say. Back in the golden days, or so the story goes, great scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward could make field-defining contributions—such as Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945), Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) and Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)—that also crackled with energy, reached a wide audience and informed public debates. But since the 1960s, academic historians have splintered into narrow subfields that speak only to one another in increasingly esoteric jargon, while the public has become incurious and incapable of reading anything longer than a few paragraphs. Popular history has come to mean political biography and military history, two fields that academic historians often avoid or even disdain.
This story is obviously a caricature. Like all caricatures it gets certain major features right, albeit in exaggerated or distorted form. It also leaves a lot out—not only the details that would bring our gauzy image of the golden days into sharper focus, but also a better sense of what popular history actually looks like today. Because history remains popular. As I write, in the spring of 2024, Erik Larson’s new book about the start of the Civil War, The Demon of Unrest, is the bestselling nonfiction book in the country, while David Grann’s The Wager, about an eighteenth-century shipwreck, has consistently ranked in the top fifteen for more than a year. These are particularly fine examples of a certain genre of history—heavy on character and plot, somewhat lighter on analysis—that is perennially popular and, in the hands of a Larson or a Grann, can be quite rewarding.
But I want to think about a different kind of popular history. What books by writers like Larson and Grann don’t offer, at least not usually, is a broader interpretation of the world, a new perspective on the past that also leads to a new understanding of the present, something that is accessible to a reasonably broad public and offers at least the potential to rearrange a reader’s mental furniture. That, or something like it, is what people mean when they refer with nostalgia to the mid-century moment of Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward.
This kind of serious but popular history does still exist. Our most well-known academic historian in this mode is probably Jill Lepore, the Harvard professor whose snappy essays in the New Yorker have won her a large and admiring readership for the way they put a human face on the historical antecedents of our own time. Yet if Lepore represents the liberal center, the driving force of contemporary interest in history has been the challenges we have seen to the liberal order from the left and the right, symbolized originally by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and more recently by Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter—challenges that have sent readers searching through the past for lessons about revolution, capitalism, fascism, racism and liberalism itself.
As a result, serious popular history of this sort may be more influential today than it has been in some time. There is, for example, a thriving cottage industry of historians and political scientists debating whether and to what extent Donald Trump is a fascist, and otherwise offering historical comparisons and analogies, usually to the Civil War or to interwar Europe. Perhaps the most popular of the historians who promise to help us understand the Trump era is the Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has accumulated an astonishing 1.5 million subscribers on Substack. Richardson’s daily newsletter Letters from an American places current events (often Trump’s trials and tribulations) in historical context, while her recent book Democracy Awakening opens with none other than Adolf Hitler.
Meanwhile, as interest in the history of American racism surged alongside the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning won a National Book Award and became a bestseller by promising nothing less than “the definitive history of racist ideas in America.” Similarly, the 1619 Project, the New York Times Magazine’s exploration of how slavery and race have shaped American life, sold out newsstands when it first appeared in August 2019. It also spawned a host of spin-offs, including a television series and a high school curriculum; the expanded book version of the project sat on the bestseller list for months after it was published in 2021.
More than any other work of history in recent memory, the 1619 Project provoked wide-ranging debates across American culture and within the historical profession, including an eighty-page forum in the American Historical Review. “There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude,” the editors noted. They believed that the 1619 Project merited the attention because it had prompted such heated and important debates about “the work history does in the world.” But what is that work? Neither the editors nor the essays that followed did much to clarify its nature. In broader public discussions it often seems to be taken for granted that history, and historians, can help us to understand the problems we face. But this consensus obscures deep disagreements about what that help should look like. So it is worth asking: What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?
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Any attempt to examine these questions about the role of history in public life will itself turn inevitably to the past. In the United States, the tradition of historians who have engaged in public debates goes back through Charles Beard in the early twentieth century and George Bancroft in the nineteenth century all the way to David Ramsay, the earliest historian of the republic. A physician based in Charleston, Ramsay delivered one of the first Independence Day orations, in 1778, and then, while being held at a British prisoner-of-war camp in St. Augustine, resolved to write a history of the revolution. Later elected to the dysfunctional Confederation Congress in the 1780s, Ramsay did research in the records of the congressional secretary while waiting (often in vain) for a quorum to convene. That experience convinced him that the fledgling country needed a new start with a stronger national government, and in 1788 he served in the South Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution. Then he completed his most important work, his two-volume History of the American Revolution, with the Constitution as its culmination, and published it the following year, just as the new government was getting under way. His history of the republic was also an argument for it.
Historians like Ramsay and Bancroft—who served in government as Secretary of the Navy under James Polk—have plenty to teach us about the potential conflicts between politics and scholarship. But they were essentially gentleman amateurs (even though Bancroft held a German Ph.D.) who lived in a world defined by very different academic and intellectual institutions. Our current model for serious popular history dates, instead, to the period after World War II, when the rapid expansion of higher education, and of the market for history, produced that golden age of books that we now hold up as paragons of the genre. Writing about this period in his recent book Popularizing the Past, the historian Nick Witham shows how the paperback revolution in publishing, the democratization of culture and the self-examination that accompanied America’s global power after World War II all fostered a cultural environment in which large numbers of Americans looked to serious historical scholarship to help them understand their world.
The story starts in the tumultuous two decades before the war, a period when a series of unprecedented crises presented social scientists—including historians—with an opportunity to prove their worth in solving complex social problems. Academic expertise remained influential through the early part of the Cold War, in part because of the contest for the hearts and minds of the Third World, which led to an explosion of growth in area-studies programs on Africa, Asia and Latin America.
But Americans did not only feel a strategic imperative to understand other peoples; they also wanted to better understand themselves. The United States had emerged from World War II as a dominant power and the leader of the free world at the same time as the country was busy incorporating millions of second-generation European immigrants. Americans understandably developed some self-consciousness about their own character and culture, and about the kind of democratic institutions and ideals they were working to export abroad. More than a dozen new programs in American studies started in the first academic year after the war, and Western Civ became a required course at many colleges. The number of annual incoming students tripled from 1950 to the early 1970s, while the total undergraduate population increased fivefold.
This growth rode the wave of the baby boom but can’t be reduced solely to demography. Instead, the popularity of higher education resulted from the broader postwar belief in experts as respected authorities, and in knowledge as an aspirational ideal. Americans who were looking for meaning and understanding believed those things could be found in college, especially in the liberal arts.
The expansion of American higher education and the popularity of the humanities had an effect on faculty too. With the number of teaching jobs growing throughout the postwar period (the membership of the American Historical Association increased by a factor of five from 1940 to 1970), the prospect of making an independent living as a writer declined. As in the field of creative writing, which followed a parallel trajectory, work that once would have been carried on outside the university was now conducted on campus. “Never before,” the historian David Hollinger has written, “had so great a proportion of the intellectual history of the United States played itself out within the academic humanities.”
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These intellectual and institutional circumstances were necessary but not sufficient for the rise of academic popular history in the postwar period. To achieve popularity, a book needs to be interesting and fun to read. Most academic history books, even good ones, are not. Academic historians are often mocked as horrible writers, but that’s not quite right, at least not on a sentence-by-sentence level. The problem is less that academic history books are poorly written than that they are overwritten, their paragraphs packed so full of evidence that there is no forward momentum, their stories outlined so completely in the introduction that no mystery and no suspense remain.
Popular postwar historians like Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward did not write like that. The reason is simple: they were not primarily historians. They thought of themselves as writers first, with history simply supplying their subject. “I am really a suppressed litterateur who couldn’t make the grade just writing good prose and had to go into history,” Hofstadter once admitted. Woodward, meanwhile, saw himself as part of the Southern Literary Renaissance—Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren. He got his Ph.D. largely because he needed the funding that came with a graduate fellowship, and then he committed himself to the academy only when his first book was a commercial failure. Even Schlesinger, the son of a prominent Harvard historian by the same name, nevertheless took his writing cues from a set of mid-century models that included Bernard DeVoto, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy.
Eventually all these writers turned to history, and departments were expanding so rapidly in the postwar years that they were able to find a place in the academy. Still, they kept their writerly commitments—and, just as important, their interest in the wider world. Woodward cultivated friendships with novelists such as Warren and William Styron; Hofstadter learned from the sociologists C. Wright Mills, David Riesman and Robert Merton; and Schlesinger always kept at least one foot (sometimes two) planted in professional politics.
Engaged with the world as they were, these scholars wanted to think in conversation with society rather than lecturing it from a distance. In retrospect, one thing that is striking in the work of Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Woodward is their willingness to write about the history and the problems of their own time. In addition to applying historical analysis to the present, the mid-century historians also achieved popularity by writing in the mode of creative synthesis, not archival spadework. “In my view,” Hofstadter once wrote, “a little insight is worth a great deal of research; and a lot of insight … is worth tons of research.” They assembled their books not just from arguments and evidence, as academics usually do, but from story and character, irony and tragedy, suggestion and subtlety. They framed the stakes in human terms, emphasizing the moral and political implications as much as, if not more than, historiographical interventions. Instead of grinding their story to a halt to tell readers about the multiple contexts in which a subject operated, they showed people moving through the world and encountering obstacles and opportunities along the way.
But perhaps the main thing that made this generation of historians popular, and that gave their work some staying power, was their willingness to subject the United States to a critical reexamination at a time of intense pro-American propaganda and political pressure. In The American Political Tradition, Hofstadter lamented the “overpowering nostalgia” and “spirit of sentimental appreciation” that had characterized American attitudes toward the past during the Depression and World War II. Advocating instead for “critical analysis,” he famously claimed that the United States was “a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity,” its political culture consisting of a series of minor quarrels among politicians who all shared a commitment to capitalism and private property. Such sweeping, critical claims about American history helped give readers a fresh perspective not only on the past, but also on the politics and leaders of their own time.
Hofstadter recognized that there was always a gap—sometimes ironic, sometimes tragic—between ideology and reality. Indeed, looking back at The American Political Tradition today, the chief thing that stands out is its attention to irony and paradox. The whole book amounted to a serious of vigorous and often humorous reinterpretations of American political figures who had, in many cases, become mute caricatures. Yet while Hofstadter’s judgments were lively and sharp, they were not mean-spirited; even as he lamented some ideas and developments, he showed them a wry respect. For example, he described Grover Cleveland as “the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age” because “out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician might have sold them for a price.” Hofstadter’s cynicism was balanced by his interest in teasing out how these men might have thought about their own actions and commitments.
In his next book, The Age of Reform (1955), Hofstadter proved especially adept in his use of social psychology, analyzing the status anxieties and grievances that he saw animating the reform activities of earlier generations of Populists and Progressives, and the functions that ideas about responsibility and guilt played in their worldview. Hofstadter himself had grown up in the reform tradition and valued its many achievements, but he was not looking for heroes. “I have found much that was retrograde and delusive, a little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic,” he noted. He recognized the irony that in banding together to defend individualistic values, the reformers had brought themselves “closer to the techniques of organization they feared,” and that in trying to save individualism from big business they had ended up creating the kind of big government they might have deplored. This was something new, full of nuance and complexity, unconscious motives and unintended consequences—it had the suspense and psychological insight of a good novel.
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The final element that elevated the mid-century historians to unprecedented popularity and influence was the political turmoil of the 1960s, the civil rights movement and Vietnam above all, when the virtues of American democracy came in for a fresh round of questioning. In a single decade, the annual number of graduates who majored in humanities tripled, as did graduate-school enrollments in those subjects, as Americans turned to the past to understand the roots of the country’s problems. The biggest beneficiaries of this surge of interest in history were the relatively small number of liberal, egalitarian and also readable books about slavery and race, which were suddenly seen as essential to understanding America.
Chief among these was Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The book was published less than a year after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school-desegregation case, in May 1954. Woodward, who was then a prominent Southern historian at Johns Hopkins University, had been invited to deliver an important series of lectures at the University of Virginia that fall. In the wake of the Brown decision, he took aim at the notion, widespread among white Southerners and many others, that segregation was the natural, inevitable and only peaceful means of regulating racial relations. This idea propped up segregation by warning of the chaos that would accompany its eradication. Woodward thought it was based on bad history. Far from a natural or immutable system dating to time immemorial, he showed, Jim Crow had been implemented in Southern legal codes scarcely two generations before.
Throughout the postwar period, Woodward worried that Southern resistance to civil rights would tie Southern identity irrevocably to segregation. “If this definition is allowed to prevail,” he believed, “it will be an evil day for the Southern heritage.” In contrast, the whole thrust of his scholarship was to show that the region, even its white residents, had almost always contained significant internal conflicts over the questions of civil rights and racial equality. As the South debated those issues once again, Woodward saw the region as perched precariously between past and future. “We can either move forward,” he would later declare, “or, as we have in the past, turn backward. … This is our last best hope to deal with an ancient problem in a manner of which we can be proud.”
Woodward’s Virginia lectures were an attempt to push the region forward. They proved to be a great success, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds. Oxford University Press rushed them into print the following spring, going almost straight from speaking notes to bound volumes. This left the book a little light, subject to significant criticism from historians and misinterpretation by the public, but it did nothing to harm sales, especially after Oxford put out a paperback edition in 1957. Soon the press was doing reprints every six months, and as the civil rights movement gained steam, in the early 1960s, Americans began buying tens of thousands of copies per year. At the Selma march in the spring of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. cited The Strange Career and Woodward himself (who was at the march) for his claim that “racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War” but was imposed later as “a political stratagem … to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.”
By that time, the civil rights movement and the expansion of American higher education had pushed sales of Woodward’s book to forty thousand per year; similarly gaudy figures litter the letters of many prominent American historians at the time. Thanks in large part to the book’s success, Woodward ascended to the status of “America’s historian,” according to a recent biography, and became the country’s historical conscience, too, using the remainder of his long career to reflect on the relationship between identity, history and myth in America. He saw the work of history as “the critique of myths,” not the embodiment or destruction of them. The goal, he said, should be to make it possible for intelligent Americans to “speak of the myth of equality without self-consciousness or cynicism, and embrace it without striking the pose of a defiant Jacksonian of the 1830s.” Similarly, Westerners ought to be able “to cherish and preserve frontier values without assuming the role of a Davy Crockett.” He even held out hope that Southerners could “salvage some of the aristocratic heritage without wallowing in the Plantation Legend.”
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The cultural position of history, and of college, soon changed. The expansion of American higher education in the postwar period may have made academic popular history possible by providing an eager audience—even a captive audience, when it came to classroom assignments—but it also promoted an inward turn on the part of academics. As the historical profession grew and funding improved, it became easier for historians and other academics to write only for one another. Not only easier, but in many cases imperative, since hiring and tenure were beginning already by the 1950s to be based more on scholarship than on teaching or sociability, a change that was later cemented with the rise of anti-discrimination measures—and the new hiring practices they required—in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The pursuit of scholarship displaced the provision of a liberal education as the main mission of many institutions, which dropped Western Civ and other core courses in favor of a distribution requirement better suited to faculty specialization.
Meanwhile, colleges confronted the leading edge of what has now become a long-term crisis. In 1975, enrollments fell for the first time in a generation. At the same time, double-digit inflation rates meant the real value of federal and state appropriations for education also fell, as did the real value of tuition payments. The crunch was felt most keenly at public institutions, but even wealthy private schools were squeezed. The crisis eased in the 1980s, thanks in part to the expansion of medical research and the rise in revenues from university health centers, but its legacy was a decisive shift toward privatization and entrepreneurialism in academic life.
Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, the percentage of undergraduates majoring in history tumbled by nearly two-thirds, while faculty hiring stalled and the production of history Ph.D.s fell by half. With fewer students stepping foot in a college history course, and historians increasingly writing specialized studies, a gap opened between academic and popular understandings of American history. This gap was exacerbated by the shifting tone of scholarship, which had an effect even on those few history books that did succeed in reaching larger audiences. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) remains perhaps the most influential example of the change. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate and the perceived shortcomings of the civil rights movement, left-leaning academics like Zinn showed skepticism bordering on contempt toward the kind of optimistic narratives that often guided public interpretations, instead emphasizing the darker features of the American story: dispossession, struggle and enslavement.
Woodward soon observed that “a seller’s market for guilt” had grown up, one whose “bargains … are to be found mainly in the past.” As Woodward himself knew, plenty of earlier historians had written about historical crimes and transgressions. But he thought those earlier generations, including his own, had been careful to assign specific evils to specific agents (slaveholders, frontiersmen, political bosses, big businessmen and so on). “The new guilt is different,” he believed. “It is something congenital, inherent, intrinsic, collective, something possibly inexpiable, and probably ineradicable.” It confused history with genetics, drawing a straight line from the Pequot War to My Lai and turning American history into a nonstop story of oppression.
Throughout this period, academic historians felt themselves to be in a fog of confusion. They continued to do solid work, and they celebrated the proliferation of scholarship on a growing array of topics, but they could no longer articulate the point of it all. “The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” lamented the president of the American Historical Association in 1986. Scholars wrote a series of interminable articles calling for a new narrative synthesis of American history.
And then something surprising happened: historians actually did it. They took the new scholarship that had accumulated since the 1960s and responded to the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s—which demonstrated the dire consequences of the growing gap between academic and popular understandings of history—by writing a remarkable string of accessible narrative histories over the next two decades: Eric Foner’s Reconstruction (1988), James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution (1991), Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick’s The Age of Federalism (1993), James Patterson’s Grand Expectations (1996), Foner’s The Story of American Freedom (1998), Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone (1998), David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear (1999), Alan Taylor’s American Colonies (2001), Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001), Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy (2005), David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage (2006), Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan (2008) and Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation (2009), plus several mammoth biographies that doubled as sterling histories of American politics and society, including David Levering Lewis’s two volumes on W. E. B. Du Bois (1993-2000), Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years trilogy (1988-2006), a couple of key volumes of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson saga (1990, 2002) and Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello (2008).
Taken collectively, these books told the whole story of the United States from the colonial period to the present, defying the conventional wisdom that professional historians spurned synthesis, narrative or the reading public in these decades. Thanks to the proliferation of new fields of scholarship over the previous generation, the books had a striking breadth, and a healthy sense of American hypocrisies and failures, yet in this post-Cold War moment their authors remained convinced that there were certain things about America that were distinctive, and that at least some of those things—above all the pragmatisms, pluralisms and freedoms with which Menand’s Metaphysical Club culminated—were worthwhile. To the extent that they had a common theme, it was that disagreements defined American democracy. The “story” of American freedom, according to Foner, was “a tale of debates, disagreements, and struggles,” while Wilentz saw American democracy as “the spectacle of Americans arguing over democracy.” One of the lessons of the pragmatists in Menand’s Metaphysical Club was that “since we can never be certain we must tolerate dissent.” If this did not amount to an enduring concept like Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” or Schlesinger’s “imperial presidency,” or to a direct intervention like Woodward’s history of Jim Crow, it seemed to herald a new synthesis of American history that would be able to incorporate proliferating subfields and struggles by folding those conflicts into a broader liberal consensus, one that acknowledged deep and even violent divisions while also arguing that those divisions took place within, and were largely about, the nature and limits of freedom, democracy and liberalism.
Yet even though some of these books won major prizes and sold very well, it would be hard to argue that they had the same cultural influence as their predecessors in the postwar period. The world had changed. Enrollments in history courses had continued to decline, to the point that academic historians began to work more actively with historic sites and museums as a way of ensuring that their scholarship made its way before the public. Meanwhile, many Americans in the wake of the Cold War embraced what the historian Timothy Snyder has called “the politics of inevitability,” embodied most indelibly in the title of Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?” During the Cold War, with the conflict between capitalism and communism unresolved, history had served a purpose in informing an uncertain future that could not be assumed to be inevitable. But with that conflict at an end, and with liberal capitalism seemingly ascendant across the globe, the future now seemed fixed—and the past, therefore, irrelevant. A neoliberal consensus unmoored from custom or community—that is, from history—took hold. To the extent that the past remained relevant, it was primarily to leftists. With the collapse of communism, however, they no longer saw the past as prelude to a utopian future; instead, it could serve only as the source of the dystopian present.
Then the end of history came to an end. Or at least that is how it felt to many professors in a period defined by the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis. Convinced of the widespread incompetence, if not outright malice, of American leaders, many of the scholars who entered the academy in these years drifted even further to the left than the generations that had come before them. With the rise of the Tea Party, which drew its identity in part from a simplistic, sanitized version of the American Revolution, some historians responded with books that took on a lecturing tone, and that focused instead on the revolution’s violence and failures. They often seemed to question—at least implicitly—whether the public had the right to form its own opinions about history outside the purview of professionals. Over the next few years, following a string of widely publicized incidents of brutality against black people, scholars cohered more than ever, according to the historian Roger Geiger, “around disidentification with America and its past.”
A generation earlier, in the previous round of culture wars, the battles over American history ultimately died away because almost everyone involved still agreed that the American story was fundamentally a story about the promise of freedom, even as they disagreed over whether and when that promise had been achieved. By the 2010s, that had changed. Some maintained that American history was defined by freedom and opportunity, but many others contended it was nothing but slavery and oppression. The election of Donald Trump, whose successful 2016 presidential campaign was built on a desire to return the United States to a supposedly better past, drew the lines even more sharply. Public debates became pitched battles in which any conscientious objectors were quickly cast as opponents, and competing accounts of America’s past became freighted with an almost unbearable political burden.
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One major role of the humanities, in addition to enabling us to understand ourselves, must surely be to open our minds to lives and perspectives that are very different from our own. It should come as no surprise, then, that the ongoing half-century decline in humanistic education, which has only accelerated in the past fifteen years, has been accompanied by a striking decrease in our ability to understand ideas that diverge significantly from our own, or to imagine ourselves in the position of the people who hold them. Sometimes it seems as if we no longer believe in the possibility of such an act.
Contemporary academic historians who aim to influence public debate often make the problem worse. In the postwar period, Hofstadter could criticize the reform movements that shaped his own political education, while Woodward could express sympathy for both civil rights activists and aristocratic slaveholders. In contrast, historians today are more apt to take sides with their historical heroes lest they give any comfort to their present-day enemies. Often in their books you see a neat division of the past into two teams, such that history becomes little more than a spectator sport. In Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, you are invited to root for team antiracist against team racist; in Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening, you cheer good progressives and minorities fighting against bigoted conservatives and rapacious businessmen.
In the work of these authors, the people whom they supposedly care about are too often depicted as passive creatures who would choose correctly (that is, support civil rights and gun control and national health care) if only they weren’t being hoodwinked and manipulated by nefarious forces beyond their control. If only everyone knew the correct story of American history—namely, the story told in these books—then they would all see the light and be proper liberals. The books often lack any acknowledgment that people of good faith might hold conflicting ideas about the story of American history or that, even if they agree about the basic story, they might draw starkly different lessons from it.
A few recent books show what serious popular history can still offer today. Instead of the Manichaean divisions and determinism that characterize recent popular books on race such as Stamped from the Beginning and The 1619 Project, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement (2023) focuses on daily courtroom dramas dating back to the antebellum era to show American law as a force not only of oppression but also of opportunity, and black history as a complicated dance of racist ideas, universalist principles, material interests and practical realities. Meanwhile, in contrast to the kind of takes on recent American political history that do little more than blame conservatives or neoliberals for our problems, Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022) shows how and why the set of principles that we call neoliberalism (free trade, porous borders, deregulation, globalization) took shape in the decades after the New Deal, what happened when they dominated the political scene in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally why they have run aground in the 2000s and 2010s.
Gerstle’s book is helpful for illuminating why the current moment feels so perilous, and also so rich with potential. In that way, it offers an antidote to the Trump-fascism debate that has deadened certain corners of our historical and political discourse for the past eight years. As the intellectual historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has observed, that debate has been driven by “anxieties about the kind of politics that are replacing the old order of things, and the human tendency to fall back on stale historical analogies to grasp the booming buzzing confusion of the present.” Sadly, stale analogies and bland comparisons are among the better products of this discourse, in which history has either functioned as a form of escapist entertainment or been refashioned for the purposes of cut-rate political commentary. Such attempts to put history to popular use risk undermining the authority of historians by pretending that their expertise affords them special insight into contemporary electoral politics—a phenomenon well described by William Hogeland in a recent essay on the “Age of the Resistance Historian”—while simultaneously occluding from readers the ways in which ordinary people continue to have power and agency in the present.
The purpose of serious popular history should be to make people more self-conscious about their society, to unearth its underlying values and assumptions and to show how past events, in all their contingency and subterranean logic, managed to produce the world we live in today. With the neoliberal order having come to an end, we are at a moment when the meaning of American society is up for grabs in a way that it hasn’t been since the late 1960s and 1970s. It was in that earlier period when many of the writers we think of as the great postwar historians—Hofstadter and Woodward above all—sold tens of thousands of books a year, helping Americans make sense of who they were and what they wanted their society to be. Particularly with the 250th anniversary of independence arriving soon, we may be entering a similar period today.
With that in mind, it’s worth looking ahead to a more hopeful project, still in progress, from the Princeton historian Matthew Karp. Like the popular mid-century historians, Karp’s political and historical outlook was forged by a few searing experiences in young adulthood: America’s failed adventure in Iraq, which shaped the questions he asked in his first book (a look at the expansive foreign policy of another group of conservatives, the slaveholders of the Old South), and then the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, which turned him from a liberal into a Marx-quoting Democratic Socialist. “I was really swept away by the ideas and the energy behind that campaign in 2016,” he later recalled. “It felt distinct from anything I had experienced in my life not just in terms of what the campaign stood for, but the extent to which it felt like it had developed a mass base for what it was fighting for.”
In addition to his day job as a historian at Princeton, Karp became a contributing editor at Jacobin, where he has been a sharp analyst of election returns. In contrast to historians who merely pretend that their expertise affords special insight into contemporary electoral politics, Karp has actually put in the work. His chief concern has been what is known as “class dealignment,” with upper-class voters now breaking more Democratic while lower-class voters trend Republican. Karp has prodded his readers to honestly grapple with this phenomenon precisely because it poses such a deep challenge to his preferred form of class-based politics, at least insofar as that project might be pursued through the current Democratic Party. Refreshingly, he does not regard the mass of American workers as former or future fascists, but instead as voters who, just like the rest of us, can be won over with better politics and policies. “Underneath the partisan fear and loathing,” he wrote in his first Easy Chair column for Harper’s, published in June of this year, “‘a wide and arduous national life’ still murmurs on, linking city and countryside, crossing lines of race, gender, and culture, waiting to take hold in our politics.” The column used the novels of George Eliot to suggest some of the moral and political limitations of the typical urban Democrat’s condescending attitude toward rural workers.
For his next project, Karp is looking at the greatest example in American history of a political party that assembled a winning coalition around radical class politics: the Republican Party of the 1850s, which managed to go in six short years from nonexistence to control of the federal government by rallying Northern farmers and workers around the politics of anti-slavery. Karp published the first overview of his new research in 2019, just as the presidential campaigns were gearing up, in Jacobin and its more scholarly companion Catalyst. The piece made no present-day comparisons, but it did note that slaveholders in the 1850s made up only one percent of the American population and that the Republicans were successful in overthrowing their power and completely reorienting the policies of the federal government precisely by “building a mass movement to overthrow a ruling-class oligarchy.” “The Republican achievement in the 1850s,” he declared, “was not to isolate moral, cultural, or economic arguments against slavery, but to combine them into a compelling and victorious whole.”
Here, in other words, was a road map for radical movements today, a precursor that people could be proud of and from which they might take some inspiration. Notice that this does not require Karp to whitewash the past or to pretend its arc has always been progressive. More historians might follow his example of reminding readers that American history is at heart not a Manichean tale of good versus bad, or a deterministic tale based on some original sin, but a story of real people struggling to make moral and political decisions in a complex world. Perhaps then more of us would realize that we can exercise a similar agency and responsibility, humor and hope, in the choices we make in our own lives.
This is, and has always been, part of the promise of America—the promise that our inheritance need not define our experience, and that even as we rely on the past for our models we might also begin the world anew. The past can be instructive and informative, but it is not determinative; it surely constrains, but it doesn’t coerce. History can tell us something about who we are and where we have been, but it cannot tell us everything. At its best, it does not consign the story of the present either to epilogue or to tautology, but rather prepares us to appreciate the irony, the unpredictability and the unforeseen possibilities of the chapter we are writing for ourselves.
Art credit: Paco Pomet, Babel, 2017. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 130 × 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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