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Editor’s Foreword

The historian’s traditional preoccupation with political history, a noted French historian has recently suggested,^* is traceable to an understandable fascination with great public figures and noble deeds and events. Because the realm of politics in all its aspects—“theoretical politics, practical politics, politicians”—is by definition and in virtually all societies “the realm of the elite,” political history, he has observed, is necessarily history in the “aristocratic style,” inevitably preoccupied with the study of the public stage and the most prominent actors upon it: kings and presidents, ministers and senators, diplomats and generals. In view of the elitist orientation of political history, it is perhaps somewhat ironic that historians of the United States, the first large modern republic that has never had a true aristocracy, should have persisted in their emphasis upon political history far longer than those of any other major Western nation. That “economics, society and culture seem to have monopolized historians’ attention for the last half-century” is probably true for every other group of national historians; it does not, however, apply to those of the United States, where, despite some impressive shifts of attention over the past decade, politics continues to be the central object of concern.

The History of American Society series is an attempt to break free from this emphasis. It represents an effort to look at the American past from the wider perspective of the development of American society as a whole. It proposes not to neglect politics, and the other familiar aspects of the history of American public life, but to put them in their broad social context. Because so few specialized and dependable studies have been made of any of the many complex components of American social development—values, economic and religious organization, aspirations, social structure, and internal tensions—this series is obviously somewhat preliminary in character. Without the kind of precise information about aggregate social behavior and long-term social developments that can only be supplied by an enormous amount of detailed study, the volumes in the series will necessarily be highly impressionistic and illustrative, more speculative analyses of the meaning of contemporary social perceptions than confident syntheses of hard data with firm conclusions about the changing character of the American social system. Despite the tentative nature of this undertaking, the series may at least provide an expanded conceptual framework for viewing the American past, one that will focus not merely upon elites and their public activities but also, and primarily, upon the preoccupations, behavior, and drift of American society as a whole. Each of the seven volumes in the series will outline in broad strokes for a specific period the main thrust of American economic, social, and cultural development and the interaction between that development and American political and public life; each will also provide the reader with a guide to the specialized historical literature on that period.

The second volume to be published, Professor Howard Zinn’s extraordinarily powerful and moving reading of the recent American past Postwar America, is, chronologically, the seventh and last volume of the series. It is not a conventional work of American history, not the traditional success story, not a chronicle of the social, material, political, and diplomatic achievements of the American nation over the past quarter of a century. It is not even—and makes no pretense to be—what historians would regard as a balanced and “objective” account. Polemical in tone and informed throughout by a sense of passionate and urgent conviction, it is, rather, a stinging indictment of the dominant groups within American society for their failure to live up to the principles on which this nation was founded, a relentless and probing revelation of the glaring discrepancies between the rhetoric of American liberalism and the facts of American life in foreign affairs, social organization, corporate behavior, race relations, the administration of justice, and the toleration of dissent. Yet, this book is obviously not the product of despair. On the contrary. In the questioning of the previously unquestionable norms of American society first by blacks, then by the young, and finally even by a growing number of people at the very center of the American Establishment, Professor Zinn sees the possible beginnings of a sweeping revolution in values and behavior with the potential to mobilize the American public in a successful quest for those great elusive goals of the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This revolution, then, and the painful failures of American society—more especially those of its predominant liberal credo—are the central and complementary themes Professor Zinn employs to lead his readers through this shattering yet vital and creative period in the History of American Society.

Jack P. Greene

Johns Hopkins University