Interpreting American History I-II. [antikvár]

History is made up of facts, but also of opinions; it is not only, as Leopold von Ranke put it, "what actually happened/' but also what people who know what happened think about past events. Facts are often difficult to track down and verify, but once located they are immutable and per- manently available. Opinions are easily formed, but are as evanescent as ice in August. Of course, historical opinions are based on facts if they are any good at all, and although nearly all of them are subject eventually to modification if not outright rejection, those that retain their plausibility longest are those developed in minds steeped in knowledge of the past. Good historians have always possessed a high degree of intelligence and imagination (essential elements for the formation of sound opinions), but they have also been masters of enormous amounts of factual information collected over years of patient study. This is what raises their considered opinions to the level of what are called interpretations—complex attempts to order many facts in such a way as to form consistent and thus per- suasive explanations of some segment of the past. This book is principally concerned with historical interpretations. It represents my attempt to find out what twenty-nine important specialists think about American history. The historians I have talked with mention thousands of facts, but employ them primarily to explain and justify their opinions, that is, to interpret history. The result makes up a history of the United States from its colonial beginnings to the present, but this is not the volume to turn to to learn the terms of the charter of the London Company of Virginia, the Sherman Antitrust Act, or the Yalta agreement, although these facts are discussed in its pages. It is, rather, a search for the meaning of American history to our own day. All of these historians are productive scholars and thus their interpreta- tions of their subjects of special interest are readily available. But by the very character of historical writing their published ideas appear in contexts determined by themselves and in response chiefly to their own concerns and judgments. Since historical interpretations tend to raise as many questions as they answer, the published works of these men have often led other historians to new opinions of their own, and these, in turn, have • • va