ABSTRACT
Over the last few decades, the study of early America has been transformed. As with other periods of American history-and indeed with modern historiography, in generalthe revolution has given rise to profoundly mixed results. On the one hand, recent history has enfranchised groups that were previously neglected or excluded; the historically silent, whether women, minorities, or workers, have been given their voice. The downtrodden and illiterate have been rescued from what E.P.Thompson described as the “enormous condescension of history.” Scholarly horizons have expanded in other ways to encompass feelings, emotions, attitudes, even smells and sounds. This proliferation of knowledge has deepened and enlarged our appreciation of the diversity of human experience. History is now more comprehensive, complex, and multidimensional. On the other hand, the explosion of historical information has led to few new syntheses, few coherent or integrated visions of the past, few organizing frameworks. Rather, reflections upon the overall effects of the so-called “new history” are more likely to focus upon the splintering, fragmentation, disarray, shapelessness, inaccessibility, incoherence, chaos, anarchy, and meaninglessness of it all. An oft-heard lament is the disappearance of a unitary, monolithic story, a master narrative. Peter Novick concludes that “A striking feature of the American historical profession in the last twenty years has been its inability to move toward any overarching interpretation which could organize American, or for that matter, non-American, history.”1
