Where the Depression years had aroused a deep sense of concern over how American wealth was distributed and American society structured, the successive crises of the 1960s and early 1970s, by highlighting the contradiction between the destructive capability of American technology and the moral opaqueness of those Americans who had ultimate control over its use, raised questions about the very course of “modern” historical development. After Vietnam, there could be no more easy assumptions about the goodness of American power, no more easy equating of being “modern” with being “civilized. Paul A. Cohen
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Many people believed that the post-World War II economic boom was proof that America had truly embraced the age of democracy, which had begun in the late 18th century. But by the early 1970s, historians began to realize that wealth inequality had risen sharply during this period, and that many Americans had no real control over their own lives. Historians also began to see that many of the most crucial events in American history occurred in the face of repression by government officials.

Source: Discovering History In China: American Historical Writing On The Recent Chinese Past

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  1. People who are not historians sometimes think of history as the facts about the past. Historians are supposed to know otherwise. The facts are there, to be sure, but they are infinite in number and speak, if at all, in conflicting, often unintelligible, voices. It...
  2. Our outsideness, after all, is a major part of what makes us different from the direct participants in history and enables us, as historians, to render the past intelligible and meaningful in ways that simply are not available to those immediately in- volved. In other...
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  5. Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don’t simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake here and there the intellectual scaffolding surrounding our predecessors’ work, in the...
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