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Reflections on the historian's craft and its own put in place American culture, from a master craftsman
History is to society what memory is to the average person: without it, we don't know who were, and we can't make wise decisions about where we should be going. But while the nature of memory is a continuing, the nature of history has changed radically within the last forty years, once and for all also for ill. In The Purpose of the Past, historian Gordon S. Wood examines the sea change in the field through considerations of a few of its most significant historians and their works. His book serves as both a history of American history-neither wholly a celebration nor a critique-and a disagreement for its ongoing necessity.
These are both the best of times and the worst of times for American history. New currents of thought have brought refreshing and vitally necessary changes to the discipline, expanding its compass to include previously underexamined and undervalued groups and subjects. At exactly the same time, however, strains of extreme, even nihilistic, relativism have assaulted the relevance, even the legitimacy, of the historian's work. The divide between your work of academic and popular historians has widened into a chasm, separating a few of the field's most significant new ideas from what would provide them with much greater impact: almost any real audience.
But The Purpose of the Past is not another crotchety elegy for what history once was but sadly now isn't; it is also a celebration of what, at its best, it is, and a robust argument for its ongoing necessity. On the way The Purpose of the Past offers wonderful insight into what great historians do, and exactly how they can stumble, and what strains of thought have dominated the marketplace of ideas in historical scholarship. A master historian's commanding assessment of his field, The Purpose of the Past will enlarge the capacity to appreciate history of anyone who reads it
