EVER since Gordon S. Wood's "The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787" was published in 1969 -- and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize -- his books have epitomized the best in American historiography. His pitch-perfect erudition is legendary. Wood's superb 1991 book, "The Radicalism of the American Revolution," won the Pulitzer Prize. The Brown University historian is now the go-to scholar on the American Revolution, the Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution and the Jeffersonian era. When Wood -- impeccable in his academic scholarship, never overstating an idea or padding an anecdote -- publishes, other historians pay attention. And in his sixth book, "The Purpose of the Past," he makes it abundantly clear that postmodern historical scholarship is far too self-referential. A solid work of history, he argues, shouldn't tell readers "more about the historian than the events he or she is presumably recounting."
Just tell the story
The Purpose of the Past Reflections on the Uses of History; Gordon S. Wood; Penguin Press: 308 pp., $25.95
"The Purpose of the Past" is a fine collection of Wood's best long-form book reviews from the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. It begins with a meditation on Garry Wills' extraordinary "Explaining America" (1981) and ends with a dissection of Robin L. Einhorn's pioneering "American Taxation, American Slavery" (2006). But Wood has added an afterword, a careful analysis of the long-term significance of each book through the lens of hindsight. You might say he is, in essence, reviewing his own reviews.
Frequently in "The Purpose of the Past," Wood sings the praises of historians he admires (Charles Royster, "The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company"; David Hackett Fischer, "Albion's Seed"). But Wood is not a puff-job specialist: Relishing his self-anointed role as arbiter of what constitutes real history, he denigrates the work of such notable practitioners of history as Simon Schama, John Patrick Diggins and Richard K. Matthews. And while he touts the virtues of political history, he also warns against letting modern political views infect the work he loves so dearly. "I am reminded of Rebecca West's wise observation that when politics comes in the door, truth flies out the window. Historians who want to influence politics with their history writing have missed the point of the craft; they ought to run for office."
In the 1960s, a new interpretive trend swept the history profession. Storytelling was frowned on in favor of theories. History was valued more as a science than as part of the humanities. Writing about dead white presidents or elitist institutions, for example, was dismissed as old school. This trend snowballed in the 1980s. The cultural and social historians of the Reagan era claimed that military or political history was passe, that the postmodern current of the times dictated that real masters embrace such concepts as "deconstruction," "textuality" and "essentialism." Energized by the holy trinity of race, class and gender studies, academics shunned so-called triumphalist U.S. history. "Present-day graduate students of history are well aware that 'race, class, gender' is the mantra they must repeat as they proceed through their studies and write their dissertations," Wood laments, adding, "A female historian who wanted to study the eighteenth century founders told me that she was criticized by other female scholars for wasting her time working on those 'dead, white males.' "
Spurred by technological advances in the 1980s, postmodern historians started compiling quantitative data on everything from disease rates to census analysis. This social science trend has been good for the history profession -- to a degree. The problem, Wood argues, is that such hyper-specialization turns off the general public. "Several indices revealed that the American people were becoming less and less interested in the kind of social history academics were teaching and writing," he notes, adding that at a time when enrollment in higher education was booming from 1970 to 1986, "the number of history degrees granted by all American colleges and universities declined almost by two-thirds."
Besides boring students, another casualty of this dismissive attitude toward narrative history is that few academic historians are widely read, according to Wood, leaving the field to such writers as Ron Chernow, Walter Isaacson and David McCullough. Paradoxically, the practitioners of the new cultural history -- scholars of such "people's issues" as prostitutes' rights and existential angst in factory workers -- deliberately write books accessible only to other tenured professors, which "is too bad," he writes, "since history is an endeavor that needs a wide readership to justify itself."
