ABSTRACT
The profession as a whole came to accept intellectual history only gradually in the 1930's and 1940's. The general influence of the postwar disillusion was to call into question the status of ideals in American culture. Accordingly, the principal literary and social critics mounted a withering attack on New England culture and on traditional moral authority in general. The explosive effects of the combination may be observed in the work of two amateur historians who became widely respected and influential in professional circles. The revulsion against Puritanism provoked Adams to inquire iconoclastically into the economic motives of the early settlers. In the 1930's revulsion against the supposedly false idealism of the North blossomed into a fullfledged reinterpretation of the causes of the Civil War. As a result a significant minority of progressive historians moved toward the forms of history in which Parrington had excelled: toward biography and intellectual history.
