In a previous blog post I introduced Allen Nevins as one of my historical grandparents. Nevins strongly influenced my love of biography as a method for studying and presenting the past. In this installment I will discuss the importance of two other historical grandparents who pointed in quite a different direction: cultural and social historians Paul Boyer and Merle Curti.
The first PHD-level history course that I took at Lehigh University in the fall of 1995 was U.S. History in the Twentieth Century taught by the late John Pettegrew. I believe it was his first graduate class at Lehigh. Compared to the older professors that I had at St. John’s, Pettegrew was young and dynamic, only a couple of years older than myself and perhaps younger than some of the older students in the class. As an intellectual historian, he also was more interested in theoretical frameworks, for example including works by Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan, among others, as required texts, for contextualizing the past. We hit the ground running in the first week of seminar by reading the classic Peter Novick work, That Noble Dream, and supplemented that hefty tome with several articles on narrative usage in historical writing. As we moved through the century, Dr. Pettegrew emphasized the importance of ideas and culture in framing norms, ideology, choices, politics – well, everything! His expansive definition of source materials included films, images, music, recordings, and other such items, that I never before really thought of as historical records. It seems like a “no-brainer” now, but it was an eye-opener at the time.
Pettegrew spoke openly of those who shaped his development as an historian. The most direct and strongest influence was that of his mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the great Paul Boyer. In books like Purity in Print (1968), Urban Masses and Moral Order (1978), and By Bomb’s Early Light (1985), Boyer examined the conflict between cultural and societal norms and those who dared to challenge these rules. Whether it was comic books, progressive social reform, witch trials, or atomic bombs, Boyer studied this tension, the power of the state, competing ideas, and the power of fear and hysteria. One generation back from Boyer stood Merle Curti, a pioneer intellectual and social historian, whom John described as a grandfatherly figure who freely gave his time to a young historian. Pettegrew’s gratitude for Curti’s generosity is evident in an article he wrote in 1998 for The History Teacher. Curti is probably most remembered today as the author of Roots of American Loyalty, which moved along the same track as Boyer would later, which is to say, how loyalty was defined, determined, challenged, and punished, over the course of American history. We read a fragment from Curti’s classic in that first seminar, but I have since read the complete book. Written in 1948, it is clearly dated and of an older style, but still worth a sampling if you are drawn to the historiography of the concepts Curti reviewed.
Training I received in cultural, intellectual, and social history at Lehigh vastly expanded my horizons. This did not contradict biography, but complemented it. Individuals were better understood when placed in their cultural and social milieu. I learned to better appreciate ideas and their implementation. Deeds, or end products like policy, were important, but I became more concerned with understanding the process of how individual agency, cultural/social environment, and clashing ideas and purposes, forged an outcome.
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