ABSTRACT
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century five American scholars published major works on American history. James Ford Rhodes, working on an equally large scale, studied the era of the Civil War. While the principal amateur historians shared a somewhat similar view of the meaning of American history, in choice of subject matter they displayed an impressive breadth and range of interest. Several of them, of course, concentrated on political and military events. Roosevelt's annals of border warfare embraced all the multifarious activities of the western settlements. Objectivity must temper but should not supplant the claims of art. As inheritors of a literary tradition, the gentlemen-historians still had an interest in the role of individuals. A secure faith in evolutionary progress enabled them to suppose that they, standing at the summit of history, could truly judge the actions and standards of earlier times by their own without loss of scientific objectivity.
