Late in Peter Novick’s standard work on the history of the American history profession, he drops in a quotation from Conor Cruise O’Brien: “Of history and its consequences it may be said: ‘Those who can, gloat; those who can’t, brood.'” Novick applies the quote to a startling pattern in the historiography of slavery that emerged from the 1960s and 1970s: While there are some exceptions to the rule, those who have written the most influential studies of white attitudes and behavior toward blacks were almost all gentiles—David Brion Davis, George Frederickson, Winthrop Jordan, Morgan Kousser, James McPherson; those who wrote Read more