Books, Arts & Manners: Woodward’s Strange Career

The Future of the Past, by C. Vann Woodward (Oxford University Press, 370 pp., $24.95)

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the writing of history in America was a “calling” or avocation practiced by gentlemen (and sometimes ladies) of leisure and letters. The most successful were William Prescott, Francis Parkman, and George Bancroft, contemporaries of the great Scottish historians Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay, whose works the Americans outsold. Historians addressed an unspecialized public —history was the best selling and most prestigious branch of literature— and they were at pains to write on subjects of common interest in language that the public could and did understand.

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Forrest McDonald

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The Future of the Past, by C. Vann Woodward (Oxford University Press, 370 pp., $24.95)

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the writing of history in America was a “calling” or avocation practiced by gentlemen (and sometimes ladies) of leisure and letters. The most successful were William Prescott, Francis Parkman, and George Bancroft, contemporaries of the great Scottish historians Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay, whose works the Americans outsold. Historians addressed an unspecialized public —history was the best selling and most prestigious branch of literature— and they were at pains to write on subjects of common interest in language that the public could and did understand.