ABSTRACT
J. Rogers Hollingsworth, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, provided a comprehensive review of many of the new interpretations written during the 1940s and 1950s. He illustrates the post-war emphases by historians upon consensus rather than conflict, and upon continuity rather than drastic change. The writers had stressed conflict as a basic theme in the American past by emphasizing section versus section, class versus class, ideology versus ideology, agrarianism versus industrialism. Starting from a different position, but arriving at essentially the same conclusion as Louis Hartz, Clinton Rossiter tells that the political theory of the colonial period was characterized by a “deep-rooted conservatism” because the colonists had already achieved freedom and did not have to fight for it. The goal "was simply to consolidate, then expand by cautious stages, the large measure of liberty and prosperity that was part of their established way of life.".
