Go here to read an obituary for one the the leading scholars of American history, Bernard Bailyn. Bailyn, who died on August 7, aged 97, was at the vanguard of the "new history." Already in the 1960s Bailyn rejected the simplistic early twentieth century notion of economic determinism, but retained the focus on a empirical data that such Progressives championed. His was a broadly foundational view of history and thus the historian's task. Read my observations on Bailyn's great work, Those Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America-The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Knopf 2012).
As the obituary notes,
Professor Bailyn was a frequent critic of overspecialization, abstraction and politicized “presentism” — that is, interpreting past events in terms of modern thinking and values. For him, it was essential to respect the strangeness and pastness of the past, and to see it, as much as possible, on its own terms.
Bailyn's rejection of "presentism" distinguished his work from both hagiography, which remains prevalent in "Christian America" quarters, and from the contemporary "demonography" that passes for Critical thinking about history. For historians like Bailyn, American history must be understood on its own terms, neither as the outworking of God's covenantal plan of world-wide restoration nor as a singularly focused instantiation of oppression of Blacks, Indigenous Peoples, women, and others on the intersectional grid.
For all that, Bailyn was not an antiquarian collector of tidbits. The work of "new historians", at least the ones who write as well as Bailyn, make the past "present" to today. The responsibility of what to do with such insight, of course, remains ours.
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