As such, I aim to keep my commentary brief, allowing for and encouraging a thought provoking discussion. I hope that is what this post will turn into.a discussion (or discourse!) about the role of historians. Wood believes that the attention to African American slaves, women, and Native Americans has fragmented the study of history in such a way that the attention to contemporary moral standards has anachronistically distorted the study of the past, taking it out of context.Īlthough Wood and Bailyn traditionally study colonial and Revolutionary American history, I think it is important that Civil Discourse tackle a discussion of Wood’s article. As a result, many readers lack the ability to gain from historians the full narrative of American history. Namely that “t’s as if academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should become simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.” Wood goes on to argue that the academic focus on “inequality and white privilege in America society” via the proliferating studies of race and gender history has distracted the historical community. Wood asserts that while this criticism is telling, it is also telling on the state of the historical profession. It seems that Bailyn’s Peopling of British North America series has received a fair amount of criticism because it relegates the experiences of Native and African Americans to the sidelines. Throughout that piece, “ History in Context: The American Vision of Bernard Bailyn,” Wood praised his mentor for seeing the large themes and movements in American history without being waylaid by minutia, while simultaneously criticizing the current state of the history profession. Gordon Wood, the esteemed historian of colonial and Revolutionary history, stirred up serious debate in a recent essay in The Weekly Standard.

The idea of america gordon wood