Historiography

The Trinity

• Gender (vs. sex)

• Class (vs. caste)

• Race (vs. ethnicity)– The Bermuda Triangle

Narrative Forms

• Comedy: bad things working out in the end• Tragedy: fatal flaw• Irony: unexpected outcome

– Not the Alanis Morissette song

• Teleology: Hegel—thesis, antithesis, synthesis ultimate outcome guided by “Spirit”

• Material determination: Marx– Base and superstructure

Overall Interpretations• Germ theory: “germs” of American society come

from Europe (esp. England and Germany)• Frederick Jackson Turner: frontier thesis

American exceptionalism• Richard White: middle ground / borderlands

• Progressives: class conflict; Charles Beard• Consensus: ideological commonality; Richard

Hofstadter• (New) Social History: demographics, non-elite• Post-CRM: Black history, Feminism, neo-

Marxism, microhistory

Colonial

• Declension model• Perry Miller: New England mind, jeremiads as

proof of continuity• Edmund Morgan: slavery democracy• Jack Greene and J.R. Pole: developmental

framework: simplification elaboration replication– Anglicization

• Atlantic World: comparative method linking N+S America, Europe, Africa– Ira Berlin, “From Creoles to Africans”

Revolution

• Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood: Classical Republicanism, ideology

• Gary Nash: old-style Progressive class conflict w/ Zinn focus on lower orders (pre-elite rebellion against authority)

Antebellum

• Charles Sellers: The Market Revolution (neo-Marxist analysis industrialization and impact society)

• Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (neo-progressive: class and ideological conflict; reading FDR into AJ)

• Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (reform as middle class control)

Slavery and Reconstruction

• Plantation School (Washington, U.B. Phillips) vs. Stanley Elkins (infantilizing concentration camps) vs. Eugene Genovese: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

• “Birth of a Nation” vs. W.E.B. DuBois and Eric Foner

Points of Conflict

• Industrialization: Robber Barons or Captains of Industry?

• Populists and Progressives: Reformers or Conservatives?

• Great Depression: Free market critics of government (Milton Friedman) vs. Critics of capitalism (J.M. Keynes)

• 1950s: Conformity or Rebellion?• 1960s: Success or failure of social movements