Gordon Wood on the Art of American History

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	• The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History Gordon S. Wood Penguin Press HC, The, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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A very worthy read

This book is a compilation of Gordon Wood's book reviews ranging from 1981 to 2007. They are arranged with chapter titles describing how each applies as a larger narrative on the contemporary state of the field of history. Examples of titles are "Microhistory" and "Anachronism in History".

The book is mostly a place for Wood to display his criticisms for postmodern historical methods. While it may seem like doing this by compiling book reviews is an odd way of doing so, the result is successful in displaying many of Wood's issues. Wood is a brutal reviewer, and there are no books that receive what could be considered "praise" while there are several that he handles ruthlessly. He is also a fairly accessible writer that any educated person should be able to understand, especially with these reviews which were written for general readers in the first place.

So what are Wood's specific views? The overall aura of this book is not necessarily that he despises all newer postmodern, multicultural ways of looking at history, but rather he is quite annoyed that they are completely taking over history. For instance, he is clearly frustrated that larger narratives are no longer accepted in the field of history, as everything has turned into microhistories. Microhistories are basically using individual stories of common people to help make inferences from the past. Wood is also frustrated with extreme multicultural history, which constantly distorts his beloved American Revolution topic that he has dedicated much of his life to. These are perhaps the most entertaining and well-argued reviews of the bunch. He seems to enjoy having a venue to bash the historians who have placed a huge meaning of the U.S. Constitution on its failure to free slaves. Wood finds this as a particularly significant and harmful anachronism.

This book might be best read by those who do not agree with him. Perhaps the Howard Zinn lover (or other stubbornly multiculturalist historians) may realize that Zinn is precisely the type of historian that America needs to be warned against. As Wood states "I suppose the most flagrant examples of present-mindedness in history writing come from trying to inject politics into history books. I am reminded of Rebecca West's wise observation that when politics comes in the door, the truth flies out the window."

Of course, however, Wood seems to find some good in the new history writing, he just believes it should be more balanced. Although that may be lost by the fact that he has very little positive things to say in most of his reviews. Perhaps the pessimism found all over the book is one of its largest drawbacks. The other significant drawback I see in this book is that some of his reviews just don't really fit very well with what their purpose is supposed to be. Ironically enough, while this entire book is mostly a criticism of multicultural and postmodern history, the chapters titled "Multicultural History" and "Postmodern History" say very little. Other reviews end up being better examples at what he is trying to say.

Most of his reviews naturally cover, as I said, the American Revolution, so if you want more of Wood on the Revolution, this is a great book. Each chapter also features a short afterword provided by Wood. He often has interesting stories to tell about the reactions different authors had of their reviews. However, most of these afterwords are very short and it would have been nicer for include more in them.

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Wood misses the point

Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth.

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Gordon Wood on the Art of American History

I found this to be just an extremely valuable collection of essays by Gordon S. Wood, one of our leading historians of the colonial and early national period (see his "The Creation of the American Republic" among other studies), consisting of 21 of his review essays. These essays originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, or the Atlantic between 1981-2007. The book's impact derives from several considerations. First, it is Wood who is writing the reviews, with tempered judgment (for the most part) and unimpeachable command of the material. Second, what Wood is up to is to illustrate trends or approaches in writing American history, as demonstrated in the various books under review.

Some of the approaches or "trends" that Wood discusses, sometimes quite critically, include influence in intellectual history; writing history from the perspective of "contemporary consciousness"; is there still a place for good narrative history?; is the "new historicism" correct that everything is relative?; can history be written as fiction (Schama's "Dead Certainties" the subject of review); microhistory; multicultural history; comparative history; postmodern history; history and myth; and "presentism." His authors include Gary Wills; Joyce Appleby; Elkin & McKitrick; Gary Nash; Jon Butler; Jill Lapore; Pauline Maier and many others. If Wood had written a straight substantive article on trends in history, the reader's eyes might become glazed over. But the device of introducing and discussing (and sometimes deconstructing) each approach within the framework of reviewing a book manifesting that approach, keeps things much more interesting and lively than one might expect. Wood also has included a useful introductory essay and an index. So the book is a fun way to learn an awful lot about the writing of American history in this country during the last quarter century or so.

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Reflections on the historian's craft and its place in American culture, from a master craftsman History is to society what memory is to the individual: without it, we don't know who we are, and we can't make wise decisions about where we should be going. But while the nature of memory is a constant, the nature of history has changed radically over the past forty years, for good but also for ill. In The Purpose of the Past, historian Gordon S. Wood examines the sea change in the field through considerations of some of its most important historians and their works. His book serves as both a history of American history-neither wholly a celebration nor a critique-and an argument 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 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 the work of academic and popular historians has widened into a chasm, separating some of the field's most important new ideas from what would give them much greater impact: any kind of 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 powerful argument for its ongoing necessity. Along the way The Purpose of the Past offers wonderful insight into what great historians do, and 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

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