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The answers may lie in the past or in the nation's changing understanding of its past. Moral uncertainty has made American historians considerably more restless in their research. It has opened new passageways, created new standards by which to make judgments. The Viet Nam era stirred a wave of indignant revisionists, who attacked the American tradition and the "consensus historians" who had for so long been its custodians. The revisionists of a decade ago—Eugene Genovese of the University of Rochester, William Appleman Williams of Oregon State, Barton Bernstein of Stanford, for example—bore down upon the old American interpretation like young prosecutors or old Calvinist divines on the trail of some innate national depravity. As they saw it, the Horatio Alger myth was mostly bunk; the land was not so much a tapestry of accommodation, compromise and progress as a battlefield of nearly irreconcilable differences. For all its panoply of "Free World" virtue, the U.S. was portrayed as the villain of the cold war; U.S. diplomacy, beneath its pretensions, teemed with the brute cupidity of capitalists in search of new markets.
Much of the revisionist research has been discredited. But in its wake has come an outpouring of historical study focused on social history: the American experience viewed from the bottom up. Where traditional histories emphasized politics and economics, institutions and elites, the newer work concentrates upon the American family, upon women, upon blacks and Indians, upon the poor and those without power. The purpose now, says Columbia University Historian James Shenton, is "inclusionism" —a mildly offensive academic term for enlarging the embrace and imagination of history.
Such historians, many of whom set up their academic homestead in the intellectual wreckage of the '60s, are sometimes given to triviality and fad, to preserving the last outposts of Consciousness III. In Looking for America: The People's History, Stanley Kutler writes about people "doing their thing," and observes, with a banality that is almost touching, "The reality of past human experience is that life is hard, life is struggle, life is ceaseless toil; yet people are resilient, people endure—sometimes with pleasure and joy, sometimes with pain and tragedy." The People, Yes! The approach in some ways merely takes up where the WPA history projects of the Depression left off when they were interrupted by World War II: