Public History and the Fragmentation of Modern American Historiography

If radical historians sought relevance through race, slavery, and gender, another axis reasserted the Progressives’ interest in public engagement. One New Left wing, influenced by British History Workshop movements, connected social history with contemporary protest, analyzing popular culture in film and television. Scholars like Lawrence W. Levine extended this work, which found an organizational voice in the Radical History Review (founded 1975). Simultaneously, a countervailing trend professionalized public history through formal training programs, the journal The Public Historian (1978), and the National Council on Public History (1980). This revived connections between academia and government, strengthening a sub-discipline that operated through museums, exhibitions, and state historical societies.

THE FRAGMENTATION OF HISTORY. The rise of social and cultural history led to the neglect of traditional staples. National political history declined in prestige and output during the 1970s, while economic history became a specialized sub-discipline disconnected from the mainstream. Religious history initially waned but revived around the twenty-first century with studies on evangelicalism and fundamentalism, reflecting a conservative political shift. However, political history persisted through presidential historians and was rejuvenated in the 1980s by political scientists like Stephen Skowronek and Theda Skocpol, who sought to "bring the state back in." The 1990s saw legal history reshape understanding of the American state, challenging older laissez-faire myths.

This proliferation of subfields fragmented the discipline. By 1985, John Higham famously depicted history as a house with closed internal doors but open, chatty windows. In 1992, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. attacked multiculturalism for threatening national identity. This fragmentation spurred two professional responses. The first sought new synthesis, inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s theories, as seen in Thomas Bender’s work "Wholes and Parts." The second was a revival of historiography, exemplified by Peter Novick’s seminal That Noble Dream (1988), which traced the ideal of objectivity and relativized historical traditions.

Peter Novick’s work reflected agnosticism toward objectivity, analyzing how social factors shaped academic history. It inspired renewed interest in intellectual history, including Dorothy Ross’s study of American exceptionalism. Defending a revised objectivity, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob authored Telling the Truth about History (1994). Meanwhile, intellectual history branched into new cultural history, embracing discourse analysis and the social construction of knowledge. The linguistic turn, led by theorists like Hayden White and scholars such as Dominic LaCapra, further transformed the field.

Ultimately, traditional historiography was marginalized but re-emerged in studies of popular memory. The profession remained a fragmented landscape where synthesis was elusive, yet vibrant debates over objectivity, public engagement, and specialized knowledge continued to drive American historical scholarship forward through the close of the twentieth century.