The Progressive historians were a group of 20th century historians of the United States associated with a historiographical tradition that embraced an economic interpretation of American history. [1] [2] Most prominent among these was Charles A. Beard, who was influential in academia and with the general public. [1]
From 1910 to the 1940s, "Progressive" historiography was dominant, especially in political studies. It stressed the central importance of class conflict in American history. Important leaders included Vernon L. Parrington, Carl L. Becker, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., John Hicks, and C. Vann Woodward. [3] The movement established a strong base at the History Department at the University of Wisconsin with Curtis Nettels, William Hesseltine, Merle Curti, Howard K. Beale, Merrill Jensen, Fred Harvey Harrington (who became the university president), William Appleman Williams, and a host of graduate students. [4] Charles A. Beard was the most prominent representative with his "Beardian" approach that reached both scholars and the general public. [1]
In covering the Civil War, Charles and Mary Beard did not find it useful to examine nationalism, unionism, states' rights, slavery, abolition or the motivations of soldiers in battle. Instead, they proclaimed it was a:
social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South. Viewed under the light of universal history, the fighting was a fleeting incident; the social revolution was the essential portentous outcome.... The Second American Revolution, while destroying the economic foundation of the slave-owning aristocracy, assured the triumph of business enterprise. [5]
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote The Age of Jackson (1945), one of the last major books from this viewpoint. Schlesinger made Jackson a hero for his successful attacks on the Second Bank of the United States. His own views were clear enough: "Moved typically by personal and class, rarely by public, considerations, the business community has invariably brought national affairs to a state of crisis and exasperated the rest of society into dissatisfaction bordering on revolt." [6]
Frederick Jackson Turner was an American historian during the early 20th century, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until 1910, and then Harvard University. He was known primarily for his frontier thesis. He trained many PhDs who went on to become well-known historians. He promoted interdisciplinary and quantitative methods, often with an emphasis on the Midwestern United States.
Charles Austin Beard was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication. While it has been frequently criticized for its methodology and conclusions, it was responsible for a wide-ranging reinterpretation of early American history.
Jacksonian democracy was a 19th-century political philosophy in the United States that expanded suffrage to most white men over the age of 21 and restructured a number of federal institutions. Originating with the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson and his supporters, it became the nation's dominant political worldview for a generation. The term itself was in active use by the 1830s.
Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus." Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" within the society as "bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship", criticizing the "hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history".
Vernon Louis Parrington was an American literary historian, scholar, and college football coach. His three-volume history of American letters, Main Currents in American Thought, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928 and was one of the most influential books for American historians of its time. Parrington taught at the College of Emporia, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Washington. He was also the head football coach at the College of Emporia from 1893 to 1896 and Oklahoma from 1897 to 1900. Parrington founded the American studies movement in 1927.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causes and downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors. He was highly influential as a director of PhD dissertations at Harvard for three decades, especially in the fields of social, women's, and immigration history. His son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007), also taught at Harvard and was a noted historian.
Mary Ritter Beard was an American historian, author, women's suffrage activist, and women's history archivist who was also a lifelong advocate of social justice. As a Progressive Era reformer, Beard was active in both the labor and women's rights movements. She also authored several books on women's role in history including On Understanding Women (1931), America Through Women's Eyes, and Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities (1946), her major work. In addition, she collaborated with her husband, historian Charles Austin Beard, as coauthor of seven textbooks, most notably The Rise of American Civilization (1927), two volumes, and America in Midpassage: A Study of the Idea of Civilization (1939) and The American Spirit (1942), the third and fourth volume of The Rise of American Civilization series. A standalone book, Basic History of the United States, was their best-selling work.
William Appleman Williams was one of the 20th century's most prominent revisionist historians of American diplomacy. He achieved the height of his influence while on the faculty of the department of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is considered to be the foremost member of the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history.
Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman (1861–1939), was an American economist who spent his entire academic career at Columbia University in New York City. Seligman is best remembered for his pioneering work involving taxation and public finance. His principles for a progressive federal income tax were adopted by Congress after the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. A prolific scholar and teacher, his students had great influence on the fiscal architecture of postcolonial nations. He served as an influential founding member of the American Economics Association.
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips was an American historian who largely defined the field of the social and economic studies of the history of the Antebellum South and slavery in the U.S. Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, and he did not investigate the numerous small farmers who held few slaves. He concluded that plantation slavery produced great wealth, but was a dead end, economically, that left the South bypassed by the industrial revolution underway in the North.
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is a 1913 book by American historian Charles A. Beard. It interpreted the early history of the United States from the lens of class conflict, arguing that the Constitution of the United States was structured to financially benefit the Founding Fathers.
Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes was an American historian, educator, diplomat, devout Catholic and academic. A student of European history, he was a leading and pioneering specialist on the study of nationalism. He was elected as president of the American Historical Association over the opposition of liberals and the more explicit Anti-Catholic bias that defined the academic community of his era. He served as United States Ambassador to Spain in World War II. Although he came under attack from the CIO and others on the left that rejected any dealings with Francoist Spain, Hayes succeeded in his mission to keep Spain neutral during the war.
Forrest McDonald, Jr. was an American historian who wrote extensively on the early national period of the United States, republicanism, and the presidency, but he is possibly best known for his polemic on the American South. He was a professor at the University of Alabama, where, together with Grady McWhiney, he developed the hypothesis that the South had been colonized by "Anglo-Celts," rather than the British Protestant farmers who populated the North.
Modern liberalism in the United States is based on the combined ideas of civil liberty and equality with support for social justice. It is one of two major political ideologies of the United States, with the other being conservatism. Economically, modern liberalism supports government regulation on private industry, opposes corporate monopolies, and supports labor rights. Its fiscal policy opposes any reduction in spending on the social safety net, while simultaneously promoting income-proportional tax reform policies to reduce deficits. It calls for active government involvement in other social and economic matters such as: reducing economic inequality, increasing diversity, expanding access to education and healthcare, regulating economic activity, and environmentalism. Modern liberalism is a large and mainstream ideology in the Democratic Party and nation. Modern liberalism was formed in the 20th century in response to the Great Depression. Major examples of modern liberal policy programs include the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the Affordable Care Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Merrill Monroe Jensen was an American historian, whose research and writing focused on the ratification of the United States Constitution. His historical interpretations are generally considered to be of the "Progressive School" of American history, the most famous exponent of which was Charles A. Beard. Jensen was a professor of history at the University of Washington (1935–1944), where he was editor of Pacific Northwest Quarterly, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1944–1976).
Howard Kennedy Beale was an American historian. He had several temporary appointments before becoming a professor of history at the University of North Carolina in 1935. His most famous student was C. Vann Woodward, who adopted the Beard-Beale approach to Reconstruction. He went to the University of Wisconsin in 1948, where he directed many dissertations. He specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, particularly the Reconstruction Era, and the foreign policy of the early 20th century. He was a noted civil libertarian and advocate for academic freedom.
The historiography of the United States refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to study the history of the United States. While history examines the interplay of events in the past, historiography examines the secondary sources written by historians as books and articles, evaluates the primary sources they use, and provides a critical examination of the methodology of historical study.
Consensus history is a term used to define a style of American historiography and classify a group of historians who emphasize the basic unity of American values and the American national character and downplay conflicts, especially conflicts along class lines, as superficial and lacking in complexity. The term originated with historian John Higham, who coined it in a 1959 article in Commentary titled "The Cult of the American Consensus". Consensus history saw its primary period of influence in the 1950s, and it remained the dominant mode of American history until historians of the New Left began to challenge it in the 1960s.
American urban history is the study of cities of the United States. Local historians have always written about their own cities. Starting in the 1920s, and led by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. at Harvard, professional historians began comparative analysis of what cities have in common, and started using theoretical models and scholarly biographies of specific cities. The United States has also had a long history of hostility to the city, as characterized for example by Thomas Jefferson's agrarianism and the Populist movement of the 1890s. Mary Sies (2003) argues:
At the start of the twenty-first century, North American urban history is flourishing. Compared to twenty-five years ago, the field has become more interdisciplinary and intellectually invigorating. Scholars are publishing increasingly sophisticated efforts to understand how the city as space intersects the urbanization process, as well as studies that recognize the full complexity of experiences for different metropolitan cohorts.
Political history in the United States covers the historiography or the methods used by political historians, political scientists, and other scholars in analyzing the history of politics in the United States.