In my own training, I encountered these three historians in ways that mirror reactions to their deaths. In my graduate training, the historian who taught Soviet history would ask us to take on Hobsbawm's analysis of Stalin and the historian of American foreign relations would ask us to defend Hobsbawm's account of the role of the United States in empire building. The historian of antebellum America used Genovese as THE touchstone for historiographical debate over the world of American slaves and the historian who taught America in 1960s would discuss the personal-political trajectory of Genovese the man.
But Charles Alexander, my advisor and mentor in U.S. intellectual history, made us absorb every molecule of Henry F. May's two major books--both served as major questions on our comprehensive exams. I have my copies of May's The End of American Innocence and The Enlightenment in America, with margin notes and underlining that reflect, as I show my students, the different ways I used the books as I moved from a first year graduate student to a budding historian writing his first book. I still get a charge reading the first line of The End of American Innocence: "Everybody knows that at some point in the twentieth centuryAmerica went through a cultural revolution." All of my work (and much of what we do on this blog) has been a investigation of that contention. It was pretty much that line that made me want to write a book on how movies changed the idea of art and culture in twentieth century America. You can see May's entire book on line here.
I found professional inspiration for my aspirations in Joan Shelley Rubin's essay on May in Reviews in American History. Rubin was, of course, another historian who had great influence on many of us in graduate school, and for me, she was a person I read to learn how to realize my aspirations of writing an work of history that was like May's. In her 1990 essay, she wrote that May's book "retains...both emotional power and analytical significance. On the most personal level, the book remains appealing because it captures and preserves figures and movements which seem, even now, exciting, creative, imbued with an energy and purpose I admire." Indeed, that sense of the immediacy of the history May related made many us realize that he, in 1959, had provided a way to use culture (as well as political and socio-economic motives) to explain any period.
For Charlie Alexander, though, there was also another reason to follow May very closely--May was an excellent writer. So I conclude with a passage from the end of May's first chapter that simply gripped me. Even though he wrote it the late 1950s, his charge sounded like something intended for what I was about to begin:
"In the long run, I suppose, one’s attitude toward the beginning of the contemporary period depends on one’s prediction of its outcome. Since my emotions about the current scene are divided, my interpretation of the past is divided also. It is not hard, retrospectively, to find the standard American culture of 1900 or 1912 seriously inadequate. Neither intellectual or social orders are likely to be overthrown unless they are inadequate. Yet revolution, and this kind of revolution in particular, has its cost. I have tried to understand both conservatives and radicals. My major purpose has been to show the size and complexity and some of the meanings of the change, and not to draw up a balance sheet of gains and losses.
If this book helps the reader to understand the revolution that got under way by 1917, it may make it easier for him to live through it, or even, in some small area, to influence its outcome. I take it for granted that this culture revolution is still going on."
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