So why did Hofstadter choose to write a book about them at that moment? Unlike other "consensus historians," such as Daniel Boorstin, Hofstadter had never celebrated consensus in American politics, and by the late 1960s he had begun to qualify his earlier interpretative bias. In the contentious air of that decade, historians were once again far more likely to emphasize conflict, but Beard, Turner, and Parrington remained hopelessly out of favor. Above all else, he had taken issue with their tendency to view American history through the lens of economic and social conflict, and responded by emphasizing consensus to such an extent that he had once been identified as part of a "cult of consensus". Always lurking in the background of his writings, that argument at long last rose to the surface and became a topic in its own right in 1968, with the publication of The Progressive Historians.įor decades, Hofstadter had poked holes in these writers' simplistic explanations of historical change and their rationalistic models of political behavior. Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon L. Advertisement for Hofstadter's The Progressive Historians, 1968.Īs we have seen, Richard Hofstadter had long been engaged in an ongoing argument with the generation of scholars preceding him, especially the historians Charles A.
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