ABSTRACT
Irwin Unger is professor of history at Washington Square College, New York University, wrote the first essay on the young neo-progressive historians born during the Great Depression who published their first scholarship in the 1960s. Unger provided a comprehensive survey of their work, which he related to the emergence of a younger generation’s protest against the status quo. The struggle for civil rights, while endorsed by liberals and “moderates,” is largely led by young people of radical commitment. The average newspaper reader knows the New Left for its activism. To the young Leftists the most obvious partisan use of history is to domesticate radicalism in America. The American past, like the past of other nations, seemed a series of confrontations between antagonistic and competing economic and class interest groups. American colonial history disclosed a sharp battle of yeoman and provincial nabob. Since 1959 the list of “consensus” historians has lengthened considerably.
