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Fashion is fickle even among historians. At the time of his death from leukemia in the fall of 1970, Richard Hofstadter was Columbia University's DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for The Age of Reform in 1956 and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life in 1964), intellectual godfather to Eric McKitrick, Christopher Lasch, Linda Kerber, and Eric Foner, vice-president of the Organization of American Historians, and an oracle among American historians. Today, Hofstadter's reputation is nearly as dead as Marley's doornail. His books remain in print, but they tend to be read as period pieces, or as provocatively entertaining essays, rather than serious historical analysis. They are the sort of thing one assigns to undergraduates to perk up interest in an American history survey course, or to graduates in a seminar devoted to historical fashions.
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Although Hofstadter died at the comparatively young age of 54, he was part of a generation, along with Arthur Schlesinger, Bernard De Voto, Daniel Boorstin, and Perry Miller, which still understood history writing to be a species of the humanities, in which felicity of style and a Continental broadness of interpretive reach were virtues. He had a vague identification with late 19th-century American thought, through The Age of Reform and Social Darwinism in American Thought (his first book, in 1944), but for all practical purposes, there was no specific "era" on which he hung his hat. In truth, Hofstadter was an editorialist of the American experience, and he was profoundly uninterested in either slogging monkishly through archives, or the people who worked in them (whom he described as "archive rats"). Conclusions rather than method, and bon mots rather than footnotes, were his long suit. "If one were to compare the proportion of time given to expression with that given to research," he once remarked, "my emphasis is on the first." Even though he filled the most prestigious chair among American university historians, people rarely read Hofstadter because he was an academic, nor did he care that most of his readership was itself not academic.
This was not the direction in which American history writing was headed in 1970. In that year, Michael Zuckerman, Philip Greven, and Kenneth Lockridge published three landmark studies of colonial New England which sent methodological shock-waves through the guild of American academic historians and stamped doom on history-writing in the epicurean style represented by Hofstadter. All three books—Zuckerman's Peaceable Kingdoms, Greven's Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts, and Lockridge's A New England Town: The First Three Hundred Years—rested on exhaustive analysis, not just of archives, but of the minutiae of everyday life which had slipped the attention even of the archivists. They wallowed in probate inventories, tax lists, marriage and death records, county clerk records, all of which supported narratives which looked more like anthropology than history. What they offered was a picture of what Peter Laslett, one of the British pioneers of this "new" history, called "a world we have lost"—a pre-industrial world of "human size" in which "the whole of life went forward in the family" and "industry and agriculture lived together in some sort of symmetry." In very short order, the new methods and the misty world of "pre-capitalism" would become an invitation to political romanticization; but in 1965, when Laslett wrote those words, the real point he wanted to make was that the life of the modern industrial world "makes us very different from our ancestors."1 And, to the dismay of Richard Hofstadter, made it infinitely more difficult to write historical editorials based on the lives of people who turned out to be as incommensurate with modern experience as the rocks on Mars.
