ABSTRACT
The ability to treat problems of ethnic development in the United States tested the aptitude for relevance of scholars who enlisted under the banner of the New History and consciously dedicated themselves both to the service of society and to description of the common people. In the twentieth century the term "New History" became the rallying cry of historians who sought to analyze the interplay of economic, social, and geographic factors with politics, institutions, and ideas. Detached from its own rhetorical manifestos, however, the New History was neither so new as it claimed to be, nor as linked to the assumptions of a particular era as its critics charged. It still exercised influence in the 1970s, and its antecedents reached far back to the first efforts to chronicle the American past. Twentieth-century scholars, confident that they had made an altogether new start, were unaware of the intellectual assumptions they shared with remote predecessors.
