Blog 4 History

I thought we were in a “Great Recession”? Well somebody please tell California that. The state that is cash poor and literally broke has unveiled a $578 million K-12 super complex that will handle 4,200. This is a shocking example of a recent trend in what are being called “Taj Mahal” schools costing $100 million-plus that are already built or being built. Call me crazy, but people in California are nuts. This school cost more than the China Olympic Stadium they built a few years ago. C’mon! At a time when teachers are losing jobs, states are writing IOU’s, and government spending is out of control, do we need mega high schools?

From the news article:

“There’s no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,’” said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.”

All for safe and clean schools, but this is ridiculous. It’s about teachers, it’s about kids, and it’s about creating a culture of learning. This can happen without spending obscene amounts of money.

As some of you know I finished last year my first stint as an A.P.U.S. teacher. Though I know I was far from perfect, I felt I did ok and really focused on the essay sections of the exam. Well, my kid’s scores came back and I was very pleased. Of the 12 students who took the exam, five of them received a perfect score of 5/5, two received a score of 4/5, two had scores of 3/5 (passing), and three did not receive a 3 or better. My average was above average and I almost had 50% at a 5, so my hat is off to the kids, they did all the work. Just a great group. My last post has a picture of the class (minus one who was not there that day). What a fantastic group, I will never forget them!

I took an unannounced leave of absence to go on vacation and get away as yesterday was the first day back to school for in-services and meetings. School with kids starts next week. I finished a semester of 12 hours of graduate work the last week of July, so I had a window and took it. Anyway, thanks for checking back I am going to get back to regular posts and look forward to your comments. – Chris

[I wanted to extend this to 5 parts but I am on my way out of town, so here is a big final part. This was a paper I submitted during my masters program.]

Henry Adams was a descendant of the iconic Adams family of presidents and statesmen, and while making his journey into the historical profession was more natural than most, he desperately wanted to be a politician but failed. Adams greatly influenced future noted historian Carl Becker. Though the scientific method was radically changing historical methodology, the idea of progress was still not far away for Becker and others as he “had postulated history as the record of progress” for society. But unlike Jackson and Bancroft, this all changed for Becker as he discovered a new kind of “complexity” in history and the evolution of the historical record. The impact was so decisive that he literally went back and rewrote previous works. Adams was one of the first to train his students in the “meticulous critical methods of German scholarship.” American students were encouraged to study abroad and upon returning to America they in turn instructed future students in the German school of scientific inquiry.

Adam’s generation of historians followed the lead of noted German historian Leopold von Ranke, who is considered to be the “pioneer” of the scientific school of historical scholarship. This time period was the turning point in the American historical profession. It is at this time when the idea of “objectivity” comes to the forefront. As noted, Adams was one of the first to train his students in the scientific method, but he still believed in “American Exceptionalism” and that “the average American” was wiser and better off than his European counterpart. Adams saw the study of American history as a “laboratory in which one could study undisturbed the social evolution of democracy.” Though his methods were more objective than any previous generation of American historians could have hoped for, Adams still saw American greatness and progress and that American history was the most worthy of study as it “represented the greatest democratic evolution the world could know.”

Though the idea of American progress was still present in the writings of these new “scientific” historians, there was something very different about their philosophy. The economic interpretation of history as seen in the writing of Karl Marx was making an impact. As Adams himself admitted in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, “he [Adams] should have also been a Marxist,” if it were not for his New England sensibilities and aversions to socialism. But there was something about the notion of history as a constant struggle between classes that appealed to him at one time in his career. Adams was not immune to seeing “phases” in history that centered on economic and social struggles, and he was not alone. Why was this becoming prominent in many academic circles? The advent of the Industrial Age, the growth of enormous cities and along with it the distribution of wealth and the growing gap between rich and poor. A new movement was taking hold in the American historical profession and one that had its roots in the social conditions of the era.

As Robert H. Wiebe noted in his “The Search for Order: 1877-1920″ the late 19th Century was one of great change that left many Americans searching for a sense of normalcy that had been lost in the transformation to a modern industrial society. This led many to a movement that would become known as Progressivism and the Progressive Era – the most important and influential political and social movement of the time and perhaps in all of American history.

It wasn’t just a social and political movement, it was a cultural shift. Just as Bancroft was a child of Victorian American, so too were the scholars of early1900s who were born from the progressive womb. These early Progressives were vital in moving the American historical profession to a truly scientific and professional level. They challenged the status quo and dared to present thesis’s that were controversial.

In 1919 Harry Elmer Barnes published History, its rise and development: a survey of the progress of historical writing from its origins to the present day, and in it he outlined the progress of the American historical profession: “The application of the more critical methods to the field of American history has resulted in works worthy to rank with the best European products and has quite reconstructed the earlier notions of American national development.” Barnes evaluated the evolution of the profession starting with Bancroft and his post-Civil War work to the current Progressives and saw that “the new scholarship had permeated the whole American university world” and was creating students who applied their methods to historical investigation. And just as importantly, the interpretation of American history had “finally been secularized.” The progress that these new historians believed in was not that of Bancroft’s theological and patriotic (American Exceptionalism) discourse, but of a progress in institutions and not men alone.

As the United States became an industrial power and the social injustices of poverty, distribution of wealth, worker’s rights, and women suffrage became important battle cries of Progressives, the historian was at work attempting to explain and interpret the present state of affairs and of historical progress. American scholars once again joined with their European counterparts and determined (echoing Marx) that an economic determination of events seemed to be at play. And they were correct; there had not been any serious inquiry into the economic aspects of historical events. There was a void and it was going to be filled.

The scholars from 1900-1920, especially, noted one historian, were looking for “economic determents” in their quest for an economic “synthesis of society.” They wanted, as did Bancroft, a usable past that for them could help address current social ills. There were studies that looked critically, for the first time in American history, at capitalism and the motivations of corporations and the evils of monopolies. Progress was not just wealth, but poverty. One of the first to look critically at economics was Edwin R.A. Seligman who wrote The Economic Interpretation of History in 1902. Not far behind was Gustavus Myers’ The History of the Great American Fortunes (1907). Algie M. Simmons, a committed socialist, wrote openly about the Social Forces in American History (1911) that first circulated as a pamphlet and addressed social ills as symptoms of economic injustices. There were histories about the “Robber Barons” and “Captains of Industry,” and each time economic synthesis was the goal.

There are two solid candidates for our “best” representation of the era: James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard. Robinson was openly critical of the previous schools of historical investigation and rightly so. To Robinson the work of Bancroft was a “crime” against history. But though Robinson was eloquent and forceful (he was a champion of “value-free” objectivity), the best representative of the time period is Beard.

Beard’s first book, The Industrial Revolution (1901), was essentially an economic interpretation of history and in it he proclaimed that the Industrial Revolution was the “universal driving force” of history, not some vague “exceptionalism” or cultural advancement. But Beard’s most important book is perhaps the most controversial American historical study ever written: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. This work best represents the Progressive sensibility of progress in the American historical profession of the time. The book shocked contemporaries and as historian Ernst Breisach noted, it should not have. All of Beard’s work was an examination of phases and processes in American history and at the core of it were always economic determinants.

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution caused an uproar, but not within Progressive academia. Newspaper editorials howled and the Right was up in arms over the abomination of Beard’s analysis, which, to put it simply, was not about American Exceptionalism and progress, but greed and power. The Founders were simply looking out for their own economic interests first, Beard concluded. He openly challenged Bancroft and his “mystic” reverence for the Founders and the Constitution. He also challenged the “so-called” scientific and objective scholars who had failed to come to his same conclusion.

Beard was, frankly, blazing a trail few dared to burn. As for his idea of “progress,” he was explicit:
The whole theory of the economic interpretation of history rests upon the concept that social progress in general is the result of contending interests in society – some favorable, others opposed to change.

Beard wanted to rescue American History from mythology at best and mysticism at worst. He used strong language such as “economic determinism” and would be accused of being a socialist. Was Beard influenced by Marxist ideology, of course, but as historian Peter Novick attests, Beard outright “rejected” Marxism. Beard bemoaned the interpretation of the Constitutional Convention as a “popular product” and created by impartial and disinterested men. Beard years after publication claimed that he did not go in search for what he found and that when he found the economic motivations behind the Founders it was, “the shock of my life.” Others have since argued that Beard was a Marxist and his goal was to destroy the image of the Constitution as a sacred document and put in its place the concepts of class struggle and Marxist ideology. The Constitutional Convention enhanced the few at the expense of the many and established the ultimate Bourgeois state, according to a Marxist interpretation.

Beard wrote that “the devotion to deductions from principles exemplified in particular cases, which is such a sign of American legal thinking, has the same effect upon correct analysis which the adherence to abstract terms had upon the advancement of learning.” For Beard it was about taking the Founders and the Constitution off the mantle and to consider them as men and not demigods. As modern scholar and American Revolution historian Gordon S. Wood has noted, that though Beard has “been proved wrong on almost every count,” he was “right” in his desire to remove the “mythical” nature and reverence of historical scholarship concerning the Founding that had taken place up to that time.

By 1914 historians were amazed at how far the American historical profession had come in its quest for objectivity and professionalism. The “New Historians” were filled with optimism and compared their craft with that of the great German historians. Jameson had declared at one time the work of American historians as “second class,” but was now sure that “an age of generalization, of synthesis, of history more largely governed and informed by general ideas” was now possible. Though an exaggeration to be sure, Jameson had reason for optimism for as we have seen the development of the American historical profession had been transformed by the early 1900s into something resembling modern historical scholarship.

There is little doubt that Bancroft would have been appalled of Beard’s economic interpretation of the American Constitution. Beard was equally critical of former generations of historians who failed, in his mind, to ask the tough questions. Both men had clear ideas of progress and the historical profession and how best to analyze and present historical data. For Bancroft the founding of the nation and the successful conclusion of the Civil War was proof that God’s will had been achieved and that America had faced its last great test. The country had finally fulfilled its promise of freedom and had become an empire of liberty. The values of the Founders had been justified and validated. There was in his eyes no need for a continuation of progress and as already noted, he even hinted at the end of history (progress) for America.

By 1920 the Progressives had experienced what they felt was the singular great challenge for America in the form of economic injustice and political corruption. Industrialization had created a “search for order” and an economic interpretation of history fit the needs of the Progressives just as Bancroft’s theological patriotism did Victorian America. The focus on progress of American institutions and government aided the Progressive causes as they sought to improve working conditions, poverty, immigration and suffrage rights. The economic interpretation of Beard made more sense to this generation than did the writing of proceeding generations. As we have seen, each new generation from 1870 to 1920 was flawed and some more deeply than others, but all sought what they believed was a usable past that conformed to the needs of their generation to strengthen their values and assumptions. By 1920 the scientific revolution ensured that the American historical profession would use methodological approaches to eventually ensure as much historical accuracy and objectivity as possible.

Peter Novick wrote in the Introduction of his book, The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, that he hoped to look effectively into what historians “thought” they were doing and what they thought they “ought” to be doing as they created history. He wished to encourage historians to a “greater self-consciousness about the nature” of their work. Novick succeed brilliantly and in this short presentation, I think, we have examined how the role of “progress” in historical interpretation and understanding, at the very least, informed if not encouraged the advancement of the historical profession.

FBI “File No. 100-360217 was begun in March 1949 in response to an order from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to Edward Scheidt, special agent in charge of the Bureau’s New York office. Zinn’s name had previously surfaced in connection with other FBI investigations of Communist Party activities, but a new report from an unnamed agent marked Zinn as a subject of special interest.”

I could not care less that Howard Zinn was a communist. However, there are interesting questions and his ties do inform us of the political and ideological views of the social justice movement which Zinn is a founding father of.

From the report:

According to the FBI, this informant gave the agency a photo of Zinn teaching his 1951 “basic Marxism” class to fellow CPUSA members in Brooklyn. That photo wasn’t included in the documents released last week, but details of the 1957 report are certainly intriguing. In the late 1940s, Zinn lived at 926 LaFayette Avenue (not “street”) in Brooklyn. George Kirschner (not “Kirshner”) was a union official at a Brooklyn brewery who, decades later, became a teacher and collaborated with Zinn on a 1995 wall-chart version of A People’s History of the United States. The informant’s account indicates that the association between Zinn and Kirschner (who died in 2008) began in the Communist Party in the late 1940s. Like Zinn, Kirschner was a World War II veteran, and they could have met through the Communist-infiltrated American Veterans Committee, in which Zinn was a ranking local official.

Given this further corroboration of Zinn’s CPUSA activities from a former comrade, the FBI evidently concluded that Zinn’s denials of party membership were lies. By 1964 — at which time Zinn was publicly denouncing Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for allegedly being reluctant to protect civil-rights protesters — J. Edgar Hoover described Zinn as having “a background of known membership in the Communist Party.” While Zinn’s CPUSA membership seems to have lapsed in the early 1950s, Hoover noted that the professor “has continued to demonstrate procommunist and anti-United States sympathies,” including outspoken support for Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Zinn was still a relatively obscure academic in 1964, but he gained national prominence for his subsequent anti-Vietnam War activism, leading “teach-ins” at Harvard, MIT, and other campuses, and traveling to Hanoi in 1968 with radical priest Daniel Berrigan. It was not until 1980 that Zinn published A People’s History of the United States, which gained pop-culture fame after Ben Affleck and Matt Damon featured it in their 1997 film Good Will Hunting. Zinn later became a prominent critic of the Bush administration’s foreign policy and, not long before his death in January, was lionized in a documentary called The People Speak, co-produced by Damon and starring Danny Glover, Sean Penn, and other luminaries of the Hollywood Left.

Zinn’s 21st-century influence takes on a new aspect in light of the FBI’s revelation of his Communist Party activities. Anyone might have innocently joined a Communist “front” group — indeed, during his New Deal years as a self-described “hemophiliac liberal,” Ronald Reagan had naively joined two such groups. But Zinn was implicated as a member of multiple Communist fronts and, tellingly, was a local officer of the American Veterans Committee at the very time when that group was identified as having been taken over by Communists. Given the preponderance of evidence, it is difficult to dispute J. Edgar Hoover’s conclusion that Zinn was no mere sympathizer or “fellow traveler,” but was indeed an active CPUSA member in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

The timing of Zinn’s Communist involvement is also important. Many well-meaning liberals had been drawn into the CPUSA during the “Popular Front” era of the 1930s, when America was menaced by the Great Depression at home and the rising specter of fascism abroad. Misleading press accounts of the Soviet Union’s “progress” during those years helped convinced many idealists that the Bolshevik Revolution represented a hopeful future.

By the late 1940s, however, those illusions had been shattered by the reality of Josef Stalin’s brutal totalitarianism. Stalin’s cynical 1939 treaty with Hitler — the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — had sacrificed Poland to the Nazis, and the Red Army’s post-war occupation of Eastern Europe had crushed all democratic resistance. Even as Zinn’s wife was collecting signatures on Communist petitions in New York, Winston Churchill was decrying the “Iron Curtain” that had descended across Europe. The Communist Party that Zinn joined was already widely recognized as the agent of an aggressive tyranny, in thrall to the paranoid dictator Stalin. Zinn evidently pursued his CPUSA activism even after the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon in 1949 and after the Cold War turned hot with the June 1950 outbreak of the Korean War.

Edmund Fisk Green (better known as John Fiske) was educated at Harvard and is a key “transitional” historian as he is sometimes compared with Bancroft as well as the scientific historians we will look at shortly. Though a believer in American progress (that he coined as “progressiveness”) Fiske rejected the Calvinism of Bancroft and instead was a disciple of famed English “scientific historian” Edward A. Freeman. Bancroft and Fiske would both agree on the dominance of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant race, they would, however, differ in the how’s and why’s.

Fiske believed in a theory of evolution that could be applied to American civilization (and the world for that matter) but his views and ideas were deemed “unconventional” and never reached the level of popularity that Bancroft had enjoyed. Since his days at Harvard (1860) Fiske was also a follower of Herbert Spence and Social Darwinism. In his book The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of his Origin, Fiske devoted a whole chapter to “Mr. Darwin.” His views on evolution dominated his writing at times and probably helped to produce his most original history, The Discovery of America (1892) where in it he discussed the “evolution of primitive society” in relation to Native Americans and not just Europeans. Fiske was one of the first historians to stress the important role that archaeology can play in the study of early American history.

Fiske never reached the level of scientific methodology that would place him in the professional level of historian as he too often relied on secondary sources and was never a great editor. Fiske also didn’t fit into Bancroft’s school of thought, though he held strong religious beliefs; however, he was never comfortable with Bancroft’s historical theology. As one modern historian noted, “To the end of his days Fiske was still trying to harmonize his religious beliefs and ideals with the latest doctrines of science.”

America’s first Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884 and its first important professional publication, the “American Historical Review,” appeared in1895. The writing of American history was changing hands from pseudo-professionals to what we would call modern scholars. The Bancroft’s and Fiske’s, though stylists and scholars in their own right, never reached the level of inquiry that the scientific and professional class did.

David Hackett Fischer in his “Historical Fallacies” wrote that each generation would have to assimilate nearly twice as many books as the proceeding generation. By the turn of the century something was happening within the American historical profession. First, it was becoming a true “profession” where scholars went to the University to study history; second, its membership was increasing exponentially and; third, the amount of scholarship produced alone demanded a change in methodology.

Prior to the 1880s the evolution of archives and collections was uneven and dispersed, and the writing of American History rested in the hands of the few. However, by the early 1900s everything had changed. In 1903, the first “Writings on American History” appeared with its bibliographical listing of published works organized into categories. The editors wrote a short introduction and in it they stated:

The writings on American history are now so numerous, so many valuable articles appear in unexpected places, so many papers are published in the proceedings of historical societies under such circumstances that they may not normally attract the attention of even the watchful specialist, so many in fact are the difficulties in the way of keeping abreast of American historical bibliography, that a list of this kind would seem to have its evident usefulness. Only by some such means as this can we avoid, as the years go by, the most baffling confusion or prevent the practical disappearance of even some important contributions.

The eventual founder and editor of the American Historical Review John Franklin Jameson noted in 1891 the growing differences between old and new scholarship in the historical profession. Before the 1890s historians worked in “isolation” and often with limited materials. He summarized his findings noting two important changes:

In the domain of American history, the change has taken effect in two directions or modes. In the first place, we have become more critical and discriminating, have learned more nearly to look upon the course of American history with an impartial eye, from the standpoint of an outsider. In the second place, there has ensued a broadening of the field of investigation and work, that its scope may correspond to the scheme of things in America, to the configuration of actual affairs.

The dawn of professionalism had been reached. This “first generation” of professional scholars evolved from 1870 to 1910, according to one historian. The idea of “progress” is still present in the works of historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and his “Frontier Hypothesis,” but the idea of progress and American civilization is less important to these new “objective” scholars who wanted scientific analysis of historical data. Jackson was closer in philosophy to Bancroft than to the new movement though he would cross over from time to time as exemplified in his 1891 essay “The Significance of History.” Therefore, probably the best representative of the “scientific” school of history was Henry Adams.

Part III coming tomorrow

[Footnotes removed so as not to allow someone to use this paper.]

Angelica Chavez did not care for American history when she was in high school as, “You knew America was going to win,” she said. “We could do no wrong, ever,” she was quoted as saying in this article. Chavez, 29, is today a history teacher and was one of 20 instructors to receive free copies of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” (For more on Zinn see, here, here, and here) from the Teaching for Change, Rethinking Schools, and the Zinn Education Project. Chavez, apparently “like many critics of traditional history books, that U.S. history is told solely from the perspective of the controlling class” (quote from the article). Therefore we need publications such as Zinn’s book(s) to balance the bias of history textbooks. I’m not sure what books Chavez is speaking of, but the vast (and I mean vast) majority of AP and regular History books I get sample copies of are very liberal in their representation (and presentation) of every minority group and of all the ill American’s have wreaked on the world (Slavery, Internment Camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ect.) So how there is still a need for some “context” of the kind Chavez means is beyond me. The context should be in every area, frankly. Chavez will be using a set of Zinn’s books this Fall to get kids, as she sees it, interested in American history by providing “context” that simply is a fallacy. I hope she counter-balances Zinn’s book with other materials? But don’t worry, Chavez stated that, “I would say I do a really good job of that because I don’t preach at my students.” Sorry, but Zinn’s book is all about bias, preaching and activism and not about good, honest history.

I have no doubt that Chavez has a passion for American history and feels she is doing what is best for her students. However, I use parts of Zinn’s book as a supplement and a discussion starter, not as the primary reading day in and day out. My concern is that her classroom will not be balanced no matter how good at not “preaching” she feels she is. I cannot help but wonder, where does the success of America fit in: the Founding of the Country and the spread of Republicanism, her contributions to ending World Wars and to defending the free world, ect.? Is it ok that America wins once in a while and can be viewed as a great place with great history and traditions? I seriously question whether or not any of this makes it into a lot of classrooms along with Howard Zinn’s biased presentation of American history.

In another article I found, title “Local history teacher brings the Zinn Education Project to the classroom,” History teacher Jeff Matlock is all about getting Zinn in the classroom. Matlock seems to use Zinn’s book far more effectively as he counters it with other materials, so kudos to him. He also has similar concerns about textbooks that I do when he said, ““The approved list of textbooks consists of books that are so wiped clean by the Left and the Right so as not to offend anybody, that it’s just a lot of pictures, a lot of color, a lot of bold face, and hardly any meat.” Not sure how much the Right is involved (though recently in Texas we have seen a swing), but whatever he makes a valid point.

The idea of progress in American society and history is as old, perhaps, as the founding of this great country. In the study of American history the idea of progress has played a key role in the evolution of historical scholarship. This paper will seek to address two issues: first, how the nature of the meaning of progress changed from 1870 to 1920; second, how that change had both positive and negative consequences. This paper will address these issues while also providing a basic historical context of the evolution of the American historical profession.

In 1854 historian George Bancroft spoke before the New York Historical Society and delivered an address titled, “The necessity, the reality, and promise of progress in the human race.” During the speech Bancroft outlined his philosophical belief in not just human progress, but historical progress towards a more virtuous existence as Americans. But there was a deeper meaning and one that hinged on progress towards an empire of liberty as established by the founding the nation, and with it the goal of a more perfect union. Bancroft’s view of progress was not secular, but spiritual and endowed by deep Christian values as established by the Founders:

The necessity of the progress of the race follows, therefore, from the fact, that the great Author of all life has left truth in its immutability to be observed, and has endowed man with the power of observation and generalization. Precisely the same conclusions will appear, if we contemplate society from the point of view of the unity of the universe. The unchanging character of law is the only basis on which continuous action can rest. Without it man would be but as the traveler over endless morasses ; the builder on quick-sands ; the mariner without compass or rudder, driven successively whithersoever changing winds may blow. The universe is the reflex and image of its Creator.

Bancroft believed in a “visible God” in history and the historian as the “poet” of history and of virtue. The historian was a moralizer who put history within a Christian context and explained important historical events as the “will of God.” Bancroft also saw the United States, though still a fledgling republic, as a world leader and an empire of liberty. For Bancroft the axis of history hinged on the struggle of good versus evil and America was a beacon for others to follow.

Bancroft was among the first generation of American Historians to study in Germany and adopt the German romantic and literate style of historical scholarship. While at the University of Gottingen, Bancroft studied under not just historians but theologians and philosophers as well. From his experiences in Germany Bancroft developed his Calvinistic and anti-Enlightenment approach to history that emphasized predetermination and God’s Will. Though never an abolitionist, when the Civil War was won Bancroft determined that the victory was preordained by God and that the American Republic had survived its greatest challenge and reached its “millennium.” He had boldly proclaimed the end of history for Americans.

The bestselling books at this time dealt with larger than life figures: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and they dealt with reverence the glorious American Revolution. Bancroft wrote a gigantic ten volume History of the United States from Discovery of the American Continent (1492-1660). The study started with colonization and was to proceed all the way to modern times, but he was never able to finish it. Bancroft was a prolific writer; the total number of words exceeded 1.7 million in his history of the United States alone.

Bancroft was guilty of aligning his facts within his theological approach to history and as a result his accuracy and interpretation was often deeply flawed. But his books were widely read and were themselves much anticipated historical events. Bancroft reflected the Victorian sensibility of Americans that the 19th Century demanded. However, by the time of his death in 1891 his patrician style of historical scholarship had been widely replaced with a more pragmatic and scientific approach.

By the late 19th Century the romantic and theological approach to history of Bancroft and his generation (Bancroft was selected as the “best” representative of his time) was insufficient for an industrializing nation such as the United States. Bancroft’s historical focus was not just too religious, idealistic, and rigid, but it also failed to address economic circumstances and rang hollow and empty to a modern sophisticated profession. As the Gilded Age progressed and the impact of wealth and power on the daily lives of average people increased, the need for a far different approach to the idea of progress emerged in the field of American historiography. That America had not faced its last great crisis in the Civil War was clear in the minds of the Progressives who wanted to addresses the social ills produced by industrialization.
During the transition from Bancroft’s romantic theological concept of historical progress to the Progressive secularized view are a group of historians who brought professionalism to the craft and sought to bring the American historical profession to equal that of the great German historians. As done so with Bancroft, we will select a “best” representative of the group.

Part II coming tomorrow

[Footnotes removed so as not to allow someone to use this paper.]

Nincompoop Hollywood writer/director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times of London (would link to it but you have to pay, a simple internet search finds commentary on this topic) — while promoting his documentary South of the Border about South American politics — that “Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support. Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.”

He spews on: “We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good,’…[Hitler] is the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect. People in America don’t know the connection between WWI and WWII.”

Stone proclaimed that the “Jewish domination of the media” is why Hitler gets the historical shaft….

My God, then again this guys loves Hugo Chavez and Castro.

The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War
Donald Stoker
(Hardback, 512 pages)

I’m going to go out on what should be a well occupied limb ready to break under the weight and say that Donald Stoker’s The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War will win award(s) next year. Stoker’s book is not just keenly researched, but he handles the war policies and strategies of the North and South in a fairly unique way.

From the publisher:

In The Grand Design , Donald Stoker provides a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted in pursuit of a strategy), Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them–or how they often failed to do so. Stoker shows that Davis, despite a West Point education and experience as Secretary of War, failed as a strategist by losing control of the political side of the war. His invasion of Kentucky was a turning point that shifted the loyalties and vast resources of the border states to the Union. Lincoln, in contrast, evolved a clear strategic vision, but he failed for years to make his generals implement it. At the level of generalship, Stoker notes that Robert E. Lee correctly determined the Union’s center of gravity, but proved mistaken in his assessment of how to destroy it. Stoker also presents evidence that the Union could have won the war in 1862, had it followed the grand plan of the much-derided general, George B. McClellan

Books have dealt with how and why the North won and the South lost, tactics, and strategy, but no other book I have read brings it all together within the political and strategic grand policies(or lack thereof) of each.

Stoker brings the startling yet obvious realization quickly to light when he points out that for a period of time when the war started Lincoln and the North had no real strategy. What was the North’s political objective? How and why does it change and how did this inform military strategy, operations, and tactics? If the North could have developed a grand strategy quickly and placed the proper instruments of war into place they could have won sooner. The South on the other hand had a clear grand strategy, and if I read Stoker correctly, but they were uneven in employing it. What is also clear, though not original in this work, is the failure of Davis and the evolution and success of Lincoln as a “grand strategist.”

I could go on and on about this truly unique and excellent work. I highly recommend it. Bravo Mr. Stoker.