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This trend demonstrates more emphatically than most intellectual realignments the way the past alters under the gaze of new generations. Children raised on the stultifying history textbooks of the past—especially those of the '40s and '50s—are apt to think of the past as a mass of impermeable and indigestible facts: a huge and useless object, as lifeless and impassive as a moonscape. But the past actually teems with an almost irrepressible life, especially in a nation as widely literate and elaborately documented as the U.S. The past constantly achieves renewals and transmogrifications as political symbol and polemical weapon. The present and the past are always in an almost constant state of argument and consultation. The past is shimmeringly changeable, always different with every change of angle, of perspective. Read the history of the Civil War from the South of perspective. Read the history of the Civil War from the Southern point of view, or of the American Revolution from the standpoint of the English. The past has almost as many possibilities as the future.
The women's movement, for example, has opened up studies that are not merely ideological fads (which they sometimes are), but new regions of historical perception. Ann Douglas' brilliant book, The Feminization of America, suggests that a 19th century alliance between sentimental female writers and clergymen dominated popular culture and created "the passive consumerism and anti-intellectualism which characterize mass culture." Carl Degler's At Odds fascinatingly traces the decline of the patriarchy and the liberalization of the family from the Revolution to the present. Many of the new social views of history amount to cultural anthropology Some of them, being the annals of the powerless, are inherently biased against those in power; the approach may be as much a fallacy as the old history style that lays down the American past in four-and eight-year strips, measuring time only by the tour of the man in the White House. Historians are filling in the large gaps of human experience that surrounded political and economic structures. Do the powerless matter? What surely counts is their relationship to society as a whole, the way all of it works.
The new quantitative method of cliometrics (from Clio, the muse of history) has demonstrated ways in which computers can define trends and correct the errors of historical preconception. For years historians have spoken of the Civil War as the nation's economic breaking point, the moment when, as Charles and Mary Beard argued 50 years ago, the urban industrial North seized power from the agrarian South in a "second American revolution." Through cliometrics, says the University of Pittsburgh's Samuel Hays, historians have analyzed such production figures as railroad mileage and steel output, and found that the "takeoff points" occurred earlier, in the 1840s and early '50s. Cliometricians also use voting data to learn, say, the cultural differences between Republicans and Democrats. (Ethnic and religious divisions turn out to be more important than arguments over economic issues.)