The New Left Challenge and the Social History Revolution in American Historiography

The dominance of consensus history, fortified by social science methods and expanding universities, seemed unassailable in the early 1960s. However, its leading practitioners soon faced devastating critiques for a Panglossian view of U.S. foreign policy and an inability to explain deep societal conflict. While the "consensus" label homogenized diverse work, it effectively captured a perceived complacency aligned with 1950s Cold War culture. This paradigm was radically disrupted by the dual catalysts of the domestic Civil Rights struggle and the Vietnam War, which exposed fundamental fractures that consensus narratives could not adequately address.

The New Left historians of the mid-1960s explicitly repudiated consensus history, seeking intellectual traditions of radicalism to confront contemporary injustices. They revived the Progressive idea of history as a "useful" discipline for social change, championing a pragmatic approach where truth was forged in activist engagement. The landmark anthology Towards a New Past (1968), edited by Barton Bernstein, showcased this radical scholarship. However, the New Left was itself intellectually diverse, containing significant strands that did not fully break from earlier assumptions about structural consensus.

One major strand emerged from the University of Wisconsin, associated with the journal Studies on the Left (founded 1959). Historians like James Weinstein and Gabriel Kolko worked in a Marxist-derived context, with Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism (1963) arguing that Progressive Era reform consolidated corporate power. Simultaneously, the "Williams School," led by William Appleman Williams, applied a Weltanschauung approach to economic foreign policy, identifying an expansionist "Open Door" consensus among elites. While critically opposing U.S. policy, these scholars often emphasized corporate domination and business consensus, thus maintaining a focus on elite cohesion rather than popular conflict.

Another group, including Jesse Lemisch, more vigorously emphasized dissent and conflict, championing "history from the bottom up." Even here, divisions existed; Staughton Lynd dismissed detached scholarship, echoing Charles Beard's relativism, while Alfred Young believed rigorous factual study would naturally advance radical causes. This period also transformed the study of slavery and reform, moving away from Stanley Elkins’s "Sambo" thesis and rehabilitating abolitionists as serious radicals, as seen in Martin Duberman’s anthology The Anti-Slavery Vanguard (1965).

African-American history was revolutionized by the confluence of the New Left, Civil Rights, and Black Power movements. The liberal framing of the 1950s, exemplified by Kenneth Stampp, was rejected in favor of asserting autonomous slave culture. Key scholars—Herbert Gutman, Lawrence W. Levine, and Eugene Genovese—though often white and from left-wing backgrounds, were deeply influenced by British Marxists like E. P. Thompson and Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

This convergence produced a major historiographical rupture, placing social history, cultural history, and class at the forefront. Herbert Gutman’s Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (1976) applied Thompsonian ideas to U.S. immigrant workers. Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974) analyzed the paternalist hegemony of slaveholders, while Lawrence W. Levine used folklore to reveal an independent African-American cultural world. Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976) argued compellingly for the resilience and cultural transmission of slave kinship networks, directly countering the econometrics of Fogel and Engerman.

By the late 1970s, the focus began shifting from slavery to Reconstruction and beyond, with seminal work by Leon Litwack (Been in the Storm So Long, 1979) and Eric Foner. Subsequent scholars, like Ira Berlin, introduced more structural, generational, and Atlantic-focused analyses, revising the 1970s emphasis on cultural autonomy. A parallel transformation occurred in women’s history and gender history, fueled by feminism. Early interdisciplinary work in journals like Feminist Studies and Signs gave way to more professionalized history, culminating in Joan Wallach Scott’s pivotal argument for gender as a category of historical analysis, often intersecting with the rising influence of Michel Foucault.

The history of sexuality emerged as a distinct field, synthesizing behavioral, Freudian, and later Foucauldian approaches, as seen in John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s Intimate Matters (1988). This trajectory—from asserting group autonomy to analyzing broader structures of power—mirrored the development of slavery studies. Collectively, these movements constituted the most significant shift in American historiography since the Progressive era, permanently centering the experiences of ordinary people, the dynamics of race and class, and the complexities of culture and power.