ABSTRACT
It is today a commonplace observation that American historiography has long been flawed by a self-congratulatory parochialism. The consensus historians who dominated their craft during the "complacent 1950's" celebrated American uniqueness, and the corollary myths of individual assimilation and peaceful progress, in tones reminiscent of Bancroft, and their generally conservative ideology implicitly sustained the Cold War as a kind of latter-day projection of Manifest Destiny. One study of cross-national data on political violence in the last twenty years concludes that when greatest weight is given to the frequency of violent events, the United States ranks 14th among 84 nations. The European state, lacking the broad sanction of such a secular faith, encumbered by a feudal past, generally endowed with greater and more centralized power, its population less divided by ethnic and racial heterogeneity, perforce was more vulnerable to collective violence-more given to destruction or to totalitarian self-defense.
