ABSTRACT
In America, as in Europe, the Enlightenment turned attention away from traditional interpretations of the past and ultimately prepared the ground for more scientific ones. In the United States, even more than in Europe, theory entered unobtrusively in the guise of the preconceptions within which historians interpreted their own experience and that of other people. Two aspects of Marxist theory attracted American historians, although not in any systematic fashion. The concept of a substructure and a superstructure, of forces operating in society to penetrate institutional lines, conformed to the long-standing urge to describe the development of the whole people. In the United States, by contrast, few historians had sufficient grasp of theory to guide a meaningful radical approach to the past. Eugene Genovese, in the effort to get out from behind the bars of a deterministic dialectic materialism inapplicable to his subject, fastened upon Antonio Gramsci's stray references to ideology.
