Five 20th Century Historians

 In the latter half of the twentieth century, a select group of professors succeeded in writing books that sold large numbers of copies and bridged the gap between a general public that cared about history and those who studied and taught it for a living. They gained a modest though palpable influence on how millions of educated Americans understood their nation’s past—and also spurred some to agitate to transform its future. In his short yet empirically rich study, Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham, a professor at University College London, explains how five of these historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—each adopted a distinct perspective and crafted a style that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

Hofstadter was the debunking liberal. In The American Political Tradition (1948), he portrayed revered leaders from the founding of the republic to the New Deal as representatives of a “common climate of American opinion” that “accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man.” With chapters like “Thomas Jefferson: the Aristocrat as Democrat,” “John C. Calhoun: the Marx of the Master Class,” and “Franklin D. Roosevelt: the Patrician as Opportunist,” Hofstadter used his great gift for irony to strip away the mythic veneer of such figures and reveal their adeptness at promoting change without fundamentally altering the US political economy.

Boorstin delighted in essentially the same capitalist ethos that Hofstadter believed restricted the scope of legitimate ideas and social policy. In a sprawling trilogy entitled The Americans (1958–1973), he celebrated entrepreneurs and advertising executives, the inventors of the sleeping car and the credit card. All of them spurned received creeds and traditions to build “everywhere communities” defined “by what they made and what they bought, and by how they learned about everything.” “Life in America was to give new meaning to the very idea of liberation,” he wrote in the first volume. “Cultural novelty and intellectual freedom were not to mean merely the exchange of one set of idols for another; they meant removal into the open air.”

Hofstadter scorned the gospel of self-reliance, while Boorstin gloried in the chance that every American had to become a “go-getter” in the practice of law, in scientific research, and particularly in the pursuit of wealth by harnessing technology and public relations for immensely profitable ends. His work won praise from conservative intellectuals like Russell Kirk and others in the circle of National Review, the postwar flagship of the intellectual right, while Hofstadter did his elegant best to “speak truth to the liberal mind” in publications like The New York Times and The New York Review.

Witham explains that Hofstadter and Boorstin appealed to general readers who picked up their books—“nonfiction that sat somewhere between vulgarity and scholarship”—to develop a more sophisticated grasp of America. Franklin, Zinn, and Lerner sought to reach a narrower, if growing, segment of the public, “those involved in, or at least sympathetic with, the period’s protest movements.”

Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom (1947) was the first comprehensive history of Black Americans to reach a sizable audience and one that bridged the color line. It opened with chapters on ancient Egypt and the “Early Negro States of Africa” and has been updated nine times—most recently by the Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham—to keep up with developments in law, popular culture, women’s history, and politics: Barack Obama waves from the cover of the ninth edition, which appeared in 2010, a year after Franklin died. Although his prose lacked the imaginative flair of Hofstadter’s and Boorstin’s, the book’s chronological sweep and thoughtful treatment of everything from the beginning of the slave trade to the flowering of Black Power made a convincing case that the history of African Americans had always been vital to the evolution of the nation.

Zinn, whose first teaching job was at Spelman, the Black women’s college in Atlanta, firmly believed that every work of history was basically a political document. He titled his thick survey A People’s History of the United States (1980) to ensure that no potential reader would wonder about his own beliefs: “With all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.” That judgment, he announced, set his book apart from nearly every other account of their past that most Americans were likely to read.

A People’s History, festooned with vivid quotes from the one percent Zinn despised as well as the exploited 99 percent he hoped would liberate themselves, has gained more renown and provoked more hostility than any of the other books and authors in Witham’s study. It has sold well over four million copies, and its ideas have filtered into mass culture. In the film Good Will Hunting (1997) Matt Damon’s character, a working-class wunderkind, praises it. In a 2002 episode of The Sopranos, Anthony Jr. cites Zinn’s view that Columbus was a brutal enslaver of indigenous Bahamians, only to get slapped down by his mafioso father: “He discovered America…. He was a brave Italian explorer. And in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.”