HISTORY by John Higham, Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert - Original PDF
نویسندگان: John Higham, Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert
خلاصه: From the time of the earliest English settlements in America, men and women of many sorts have been writing history. No one group has ever had a monopoly of the production of competent histories. Leadership in setting standards, however, has usually belonged to a particular class. Twice this leadership has changed hands. During the seventeenth century the best history was written by Puritan clergymen and by lay officials associated with them in creat- ing a new Zion in the wilderness. They wrote hastily, in whatever moments they could spare from active labors in behalf of the Puritan cause. Their history was a further extension of scripture: a chronicle of God's inscrutable will working within their own community. Clergymen long remained one of the most numerous species of his- torical writers, but their importance diminished as the church ceased to form the cultural center of American life. In the eighteenth century, patrician historians came to the fore. The growth of private wealth allowed a margin of leisure time for their studies. The weightiness of history appealed to the strong sense of social responsibility that characterized many American gentlemen; to them the historian was the ultimate human judge of men and events. They strove-without always succeeding, of course-to play a judicial role fairly and impartially, for the patrician, untrammeled by religious orthodoxy, prided himself on his independence of mind. He participated in a wide, transatlantic literary culture and wrote for an unspecialized, cultivated audience.1 During the greater part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the patrician historian held the center of the stage, and in the works of Thomas Hutchinson, Charles Gayarre, Francis Parkman, Henry C. Lea, and others, his history reached a high level of accuracy and distinction.