FROM POLITY TO EXCHANGE: THE FATE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE CHANGING FIELDS OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

Abstract

Gordon Wood stoked a strong response from his fellow early American historians in 2015 when, in the pages of theWeekly Standard, he accused the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, publishers of the prestigiousWilliam and Mary Quarterly, of abandoning interest in the development of the United States. “A new generation of historians is no longer interested in how the United States came to be,” Wood argued. “That kind of narrative history of the nation, they say, is not only inherently triumphalist but has a teleological bias built into it.” Wood blamed the shift away from the nation on historians’ interest in such issues as race and gender: “The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation's past has had to turn to the history books written by nonacademics who have no PhDs and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.” Of theWilliam and Mary Quarterly, Wood concluded, “without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.”