Hofstadter's reflections on the long-surpassed work of the progressive historians came just as a new wave of revisionists, many of them identified with the New Left, were challenging the interpretations of Hofstadter and his generation of scholars. So why did Hofstadter choose to write a book about them at that moment? Unlike other "consensus historians," such as Daniel Boorstin, Hofstadter had never celebrated consensus in American politics, and by the late 1960s he had begun to qualify his earlier interpretative bias. In the contentious air of that decade, historians were once again far more likely to emphasize conflict, but Beard, Turner, and Parrington remained hopelessly out of favor. Above all else, he had taken issue with their tendency to view American history through the lens of economic and social conflict, and responded by emphasizing consensus to such an extent that he had once been identified as part of a "cult of consensus". Always lurking in the background of his writings, that argument at long last rose to the surface and became a topic in its own right in 1968, with the publication of The Progressive Historians.įor decades, Hofstadter had poked holes in these writers' simplistic explanations of historical change and their rationalistic models of political behavior. Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon L. Hofstadter's greatest talent, however, may have been his ability to order complex events and issues and to synthesize from them a rational, constructively critical perspective on American history.Advertisement for Hofstadter's The Progressive Historians, 1968.Īs we have seen, Richard Hofstadter had long been engaged in an ongoing argument with the generation of scholars preceding him, especially the historians Charles A.
A measure of Hofstadter's standing in literary and scholarly circles is the honors he received in 1964 for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)-Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of Phi Beta Kappa, and the Sidney Hillman Prize Award. His 1955 work, The Age of Reform, which still commands respect among both historians and general readers, won him that year's Pulitzer Prize. His 1948 work, The American Political Tradition, is an enduring classic study in political history. His political, social, and intellectual histories raised serious questions about assumptions that had long been taken for granted and cast the American experience in an interesting new light. DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University from 1959 until the time of his death, Richard Hofstadter was one of the most influential historians in post-World War II America.
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