Word: bearding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Frederick Jackson Turner sounded his single but remarkably lasting note-on the paramount significance of the frontier in American history-in 1893. Charles Beard created his most influential and controversial book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in 1913. He had completed his most popular history. The Rise of American Civilization, by 1927, the year when an unknown English professor named V. L. Parrington published his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Main Currents in American Thought. These men, writes Hofstadter, were the first "to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment...
They had much else in common. Born in the 1860s and early 1870s, brought up in the Midwest (Turner in Wisconsin, Beard in Indiana, Parrington in Kansas), all of them came of age at a time when the balance of power and influence was shifting from the effete East to the still raw and resentful Midwest. The financial panic of 1893 was in the making. The Populist movement was galvanizing Westerners and farm folk everywhere into a struggle against big money and big-city interests...
Found and Lost. Sharp-tongued and harder-hitting, Beard shattered the myth of America's perfect past by a frontal assault on the Founding Fathers. In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, he argued that the great document, far from promoting the general welfare, was the reactionary work of wealthy men who in 1787 stood to profit from the creation of a strong, central and, above all, solvent government (nearly half the signers had lent the Government money). By suggesting that economic interests play a strong role in human events, Beard helped bring American history closer to the bitter...
Compared with Beard or Turner, Parrington seems a somewhat perfunctory figure. In a series of interlocking biographical sketches-marked by Anglophobia and a gift for rhetoric-Parrington, in Main Currents in American Thought, reconstructed the U.S. cultural evolution. His notion, deeply ingrained in the American character, was that art should have a social purpose; realism, it followed, was better than fantasy. The great republic, he said, had solved through a struggle between the ideas of Good Guy liberals, dissenters, democrats and humanitarians, like Roger Williams, Ben Franklin, and naturally, Thomas Jefferson, and Bad Guy conservatives like Jonathan Edwards, Increase Mather...
...Sears Roebuck and peanut butter. But since World War II, modern scholarship has nitpicked Turner to death-on grounds of detailed inaccuracy and cloudy thinkng. Parrington has been buried by the New Criticism as a prejudiced bore and a square to boot-both of which he most emphatically was. Beard has not so much been demolished as deplored for his slighting of the non-economic complexities of history...