Editor's Note
This is the second in a series of guest posts by Rebecca Brenner, a doctoral candidate (ABD) in early American history at American University in Washington, DC. She has served as Secretary of the Society for US Intellectual History since June 2017.
Philosopher and social theorist Walter Benjamin wrote “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in 1940. He wrote it in Paris, as a Jewish German anticipating the Nazi invasion that May. Benjamin committed suicide that September.[1] But in the early months of his final year – his suicide motivated by victories of the political and historical Nazi nightmare – Benjamin beseeched historians to read and write “against the grain” of the past.[2]
Last month, in April 2018, emeriti historians Joseph J. Ellis and Gordon S. Wood appeared on stage with a moderator at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida, to consider the “legacies of the founders.” Their conversation turned into an analysis of changes in the ways that professional historians – predominantly professors – study and present the early American republic. When a video of this conversation became public on C-SPAN earlier this month, May 2018, it was not well received.[3] The current battle between the “vast early America” historians and Ellis and Wood boils down to competing objectives of historical scholarship.
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