ABSTRACT
The 1960s acquired an historiographical mood. It was nothing so tight as an agenda, far less a list of specified topics or approaches. But it wanted answers, crystalline conclusions, whether they came as numbers or prosaic certainties. Like most moments that imagine themselves to have found keys to long-closed doors, it welcomed science and baptized various styles of positivism: annaliste, marxisant, anthropological, archaeological, sociological, ideologically correct, emotionally committed. It was a self-conscious decade in a way and to a degree that the despised 1950s had never aspired to be; and it nurtured an earnest view of its own importance that the 1970s and 1980s never sought. Amid the trials of Cuba and Vietnam, the Prague Spring and the Paris Spring, it depicted itself as the beginning of something significant in social and historical enquiry. It was right about its significance, wrong about its beginning. For the 1960s seem from the 1990s not a departure but an arrival. The decade became the terminus of modernism.
