The volumes of the Oxford History of the United States are enormous, almost uniformly so. As Trevor Burnard notes, the exception is James T. Patterson's contribution on the late twentieth century, Restless Giant (2005), which at 448 pages is about half the size of the other seven volumes published to date. These are books of equally epic proportions and intentions, designed as much to command appreciation as objects – huge, weighty, and not a little imposing – as they are to broadcast their scholarly qualities as works of narrative history. Arguably, appreciation of the latter is in many ways inextricably tied to their sheer size. Consider, for instance, the dust-jacket copy for Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought (2007), which describes his Pulitzer Prize-winning, 904-page work as “a monumental narrative of this formative period [1815–48] in United States history.”Footnote ¹ The books become physical representations of the power of the history within their bindings, making plain to the “educated general public” for whom they are written that the work of national history is serious business and that each constitutes the full story on any given period.

Thus far, series authors have held to similar conceptions of narrative, method, and appropriate subject matter, creating a notable consistency of story craft, argument, and historical characterization across the volumes. With the possible exception of Howe's, each book dwells largely on the “high politics,” liberal development, and military history of the federal state with a disproportionate focus on the executive branch.Footnote ² In part, this reflects the singular vision of the first editor, C. Vann Woodward, and then, after 1999, of David M. Kennedy's willingness to maintain it. Woodward outlined his aims for the series, and his sense of the dire need for such work, in a piece commissioned by the New York Times Book Review in 1982 to mark the publication of the first volume. In “A Short History of American History,” Woodward describes the professionalization of the discipline as a story of recent declension with the 1960s rise of the new social history and a subsequent rejection of good storytelling and nonspecialist readerships. “Most deplored by those who cling to the basic tradition of the craft is an indifference toward the layman,” he wrote, locating himself as being among those clinging to tradition. “It is the duty and privilege of historians, unlike scholars of other disciplines,” Woodward urged, “to present the results of the guild's researches, or at least their significance, to the layman in readable, unspecialized prose that he can understand and enjoy.”Footnote ³ Armed with a belief in the exceptionalism of history and reactionary fervor, Woodward sought to put this into practice with the Oxford series.

Woodward's concern for the state of historical writing and for audience was genuine and shared, but it was also the most palatable edge of a deeper resistance to changes in the profession, its practices, and its practitioners. Hedging his arguments through layers of passive-voice verb construction and abstract actors, Woodward still makes clear to readers his concerns about a field transformed by the G. I. Bill, international youth movements and decolonization, and New Left, Black Power, and Women's Liberation radicalizations of American universities – a field full of newly diverse people, new questions, and new subject matters. Admitting the transformative quality of these changes, Woodward nonetheless casts himself as mostly put off by them. He draws a distinction between what he terms the “analytical” and the “narrative,” as if they are and must remain mutually exclusive, and argues that the analysis of the New History rejects “events, actions, and policy” to dwell on “circumstance and ‘behavior.’” These historians researched “the masses and the powerless more than elites and the powerful,” and, in so doing, “turned from the public to the private sector: to the family, the nursery, the bedroom, the deathbed and their psychological secrets; to demography and long term shifts in population, marriage, birth rates and sex roles; to popular culture, to the histories of prisons, hospitals, villages, cities and churches; to voting behavior as prompted by ethnic and religious, rather than public issues.”Footnote ⁴ With the fragmentation of the story came the fragmentation of the field, which Woodward clearly finds distressing:

Woodward's metaphor of disintegration quivers under the weight of its gender, race, and class anxieties as it draws energy from recent experiences of white flight, deindustrialization, and recession. In this context, the Oxford History of the United States becomes for Woodward a proffered hope, the return to a unified narrative, and an assurance of a set of common national stories and glories. He would rebuild those many mansions, one enormous book at a time.

Trevor Burnard argues that the collected authors of this series look nothing like modern history departments and even less like the nation they chronicle. He is quite right. The ultimate problem, however, is not that all of the authors are white men, although this fact is striking, disturbing, and hard not to see as purposeful in a series produced in the last twenty-five years. Rather, it is that their intellectual inquiries and historical engagements seem shaped by a set of concerns that are neglectful of, if not resistant to, the last several decades of scholarly innovation, scope-widening, and change, particularly in the histories of women, gender, and sexuality. Women are scarce in these many pages, usually entering the narrative via the men they marry, support, distract, work for, sexually satisfy, or mother. Some women resist and agitate in brief and historically predictable moments connected to conventional periodizations of feminism. It is not fair to James T. Patterson to say, as Burnard does, that Howe's is the “only book to deal with feminism,” although it is not fair to feminism to say that Patterson deals with it much. Just as disappointing, excepting enslaved women and some key figures of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, such as Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and George W. Bush's national security adviser and then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice – all African or African American – most of the women included in these narrative histories are white.

The outraged temptation to list the many omissions of these already sizable books is compounded by the intellectual and political stakes generated by a celebrated series that purports to be definitive and consistently garners major prizes and large, nonacademic readerships. But to stop at calls for a different multicultural calculus misses the point, for the central problem with the Oxford History of the United States is not its lack of inclusiveness. Rather this obvious lack is a symptom of wider conceptual flaws in its very definitions of politics, of democracy, of power, and, ultimately, of history itself. These flaws rest in the series's attempt to retreat from the new social history's “turn from the public to the private sector,” as Woodward put it, rather than engage decades of work challenging that distinction and the political narratives and historical inaccuracies it has supported.Footnote ⁶ The series persists in holding to an inherently gendered separation of public and private spheres, and locates the work of national history, indeed of nation building, only and uniquely in the former. More than making it impossible to account for the full lives and experiences of most women in the American past, this blindness to the history of gender distorts that past entirely, with serious ramifications for the present and future. It allows, for instance, for a self-congratulatory and reassuring story of American liberal democracy as one of inevitable progress and the ever-expanding embrace of more diverse peoples, wider conceptions of citizenship, and national exceptionalism. Yet, as Christine Stansell has argued recently in her own popular history, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, “certain problems of gender are lodged in the very foundations of liberal democratic politics.”Footnote ⁷ Intersecting gendered and racial exclusions have not been aberrations to the American promise destined to change, but formative, constituent aspects of the very ideas and practices of freedom and democracy.

When Joan Wallach Scott first published “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” in the American Historical Review in 1986, all but one of the volumes in the Oxford series was still to come, as was the 2005 revised edition of Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause. In addition to arguing famously that “gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power,” Scott devoted much of her piece to resistance from political historians to these ideas and the notion that gender could be important to their work.Footnote ⁸ She might have been speaking to Woodward, Kennedy, and the Oxford series when she urged, “High politics itself is a gendered concept, for it establishes its crucial importance and public power, its reasons for and the fact of its highest authority, precisely in its exclusion of women from its work.”Footnote ⁹ The same could be said for the historical narration of high politics in this case and the authority of the Oxford History of the United States.

In seeking alternatives to the historical and methodological blind spots of the Oxford series, we might return to Woodward's original call for a reinvigorated interest in narrative, craft, and audience. Since the 1990s, a growing number of historians of the United States, influenced by the concerns and methods of the new social history as well as postmodernism, have looked to narrative experimentation and creative archival work to tell new, sweeping national and transnational stories through the lenses of discrete events and individual lives. Often collected under the broad and deceptively named umbrella of microhistory, work by authors such as Patricia Cline Cohen, James Goodman, Annette Gordon-Reed, Martha Hodes, Tiya Miles, Martha A. Sandweiss, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, to name a few, not only challenge received historical wisdoms, but bring complex histories of America's intersecting racial, gendered, and sexual pasts to wide popular readerships.Footnote ¹⁰

This brings us back to matters of size. In the conclusion to his contribution, Trevor Burnard argues that the authors of the Oxford History of the United States “do not present an incorrect version of American history,” so much as “a partial, one-sided and overly congratulatory interpretation.” This partial quality cannot be remedied through strategies of greater inclusion and even bigger books, but requires a different set of questions and analytic frames that must start with letting go of the volumes' organizing binary of public and private spheres. Nor should it prompt a rejection of narrative history and attention to good storytelling. Although I agree with Burnard that nonacademic audiences “deserve to know not only that there can be multiple visions of how to write American history, but also that narrative history is not the only means whereby we can learn how to structure the past,” I am not willing to cede the definition of what constitutes “narrative history” to the version practiced in the Oxford series.

With many of the criticisms made by Trevor Burnard about the Oxford History of the United States, I find it hard to dissent. It can scarcely be denied that the series's volumes have been appearing with depressing slowness, that the focus of the books has been worryingly restricted to political and military history, and that the authors are anomalously confined to white males, at a time when the American historical profession has greatly diversified.

Of a few of his criticisms, I am skeptical. It seems doubtful, for example, that the white males who are the villains of his piece can be said, so sweepingly, to embody a restricted generational standpoint. At least, the case seems hard to prove. Just being born white and male in the United States somewhere between the late 1920s and the late 1930s does not, I suspect, tell you much about “common experiences,” which could only be demonstrated by reconstructing the personal experiences of Robert Middlekauf or Daniel Walker Howe or Gordon Wood, experiences which might show commonality, but might not. Moreover, there is the problem that Burnard does not disentangle the generation of the authors from that of the early editors. Richard Hofstadter was born in 1916 and C. Vann Woodward in 1908, and the latter, at least, had a more than sufficient experience of both Depression and war, by being unemployed in the 1930s and a wartime naval officer.

I doubt, too, that the American volumes are consistently inferior to those in the New Oxford History of England, though the latter do appear with greater promptness. Boyd Hilton's wonderfully humane, witty, and erudite book A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? sets a standard hardly anyone else has reached, including almost all the other authors in the English series, with the possible exception of Robert Bartlett. Moreover, these authors seem as contradictory of one another as the Americans. The very title of Hilton's volume, after all, was chosen to refute the series's preceding volume, Paul Langford's A Polite and Commercial People. More troubling for Burnard's case, however, is that (as he himself admits, though only glancingly) all of the English authors are white males, too; so far, there have been eleven of them (mostly associated with Oxford) and eight more are on the way, with not a woman in sight. This being so, if Burnard is right that the English series is more intellectually diverse than the American, the reasons for the disparity do not reside in whiteness or masculinity, unless there is something unexpectedly diverse about Oxonian and singular about American males, which seems unlikely.

I also wonder whether it would be rational to multiply volumes about the colonial period. This series is, after all, a history of the United States, which did not exist before 1776. The proposed two volumes are, in this sense, prolegomena. To be sure, however traditional, this rationale may not be intellectually coherent, but it may be better than the only two alternatives that occur to me; that is, to have an Oxford History of the United States that starts only in 1776 or take Burnard's suggestion seriously and retitle the series as the Oxford History of North America, the Caribbean, and Central America up to 1776 and the United States Afterwards (Forgetting Canada, the Caribbean, and Central America), which is surely more incoherent.

But that is by the by. As it happens, I am editing C. Vann Woodward's letters and have gone through his papers in the Sterling Library at Yale, as well as sundry other collections both at Yale and elsewhere, including the Hofstadter Papers at Columbia. Among those papers are many letters and documents which bear on the editing of the Oxford History of the United States. So though I cannot say anything about the internal history of the series since David Kennedy took over, I can offer a few pieces of evidence about the series under Hofstadter and Woodward (1961–69), then Woodward alone until his death in 1999, pieces which might shed light on Burnard's critique.

The first thing to say is that Hofstadter's role looms larger than Burnard allows. Although it is true that the former died before any volumes appeared, he was intimately involved in planning and establishing the ethos of the series and, even after his death, Woodward self-consciously honored Hofstadter's legacy. (The letterhead that gave both names was still used by Woodward as late as the 1980s.) Moreover, neither Woodward nor Hofstadter had any hostility towards many forms of historical writing that did not stress politics and war. For his part, Hofstadter was always anxious to encourage historiographical heterodoxy and was often at intellectual odds with the historians who surrounded him. When in 1959 Eric McKitrick's doctoral defence of his study of Reconstruction went less than well, for example, Hofstadter wrote to Woodward,

So it was logical that Hofstadter, as well as Woodward, did much to widen the vision of the series beyond the original narrow mandate from Oxford University Press, which had said that the series would consist of “half a dozen chronological volumes, each by a single author, with the focus on political history,” while also allowing for three independent volumes on intellectual, diplomatic, and economic history. Certainly neither of the original editors had the least investment in seeing the United States as beginning in perfection and proceeding to decline, because of an overcommitment to egalitarianism. Woodward himself was one of the most trenchant critics of American exceptionalism and the editor of a volume on The Comparative Approach to American History.Footnote ² Moreover, the notion that he was a narrow political historian, persuaded by an old slogan tacked to the wall of the Johns Hopkins seminar room that politics defined history, is, frankly, bizarrely mistaken.

The second, more important thing to observe is that, although Burnard's criticisms make sense from the standpoint of a reader, they make less sense from the standpoint of an editor of a series such as this, because Burnard tends to assume that conception and accomplishment have a tidy relationship and that what the series has become is what the editors intended. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth, at least for the Woodward and Hofstadter years. For one thing, as Woodward put it in 1969, “The editors urge the utmost autonomy of the author in the planning, organization and writing of the book. We are not looking for scrupulous coverage and rehash so much as originality and reinterpretation.” Hence there was an intentional gap between what the editors might have preferred and what the authors might decide to produce. For another, the editorial correspondence shows that it was exceptionally difficult to obtain good authors and still more difficult to extract manuscripts from them. There were the historians who declined to participate, at all: these included, at various moments, Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Carl Bridenbaugh, John Higham, Richard B. Morris, Martin Duberman, Eugene Genovese, Marcus Cunliffe, Richard Dunn, Daniel Rodgers, and Alan Brinkley. There were those who signed contracts or agreed to write books and then, after sometimes writing something and sometimes not, withdrew for sundry reasons, good and bad: these included Merrill Jensen, William Leuchtenberg, Ernest R. May, Norman Graebner, John William Ward, Kenneth Stampp, William Freehling, Timothy Breen, Merrill Peterson, Alden Vaughan, R. Jackson Wilson, Willie Lee Rose, William Harbaugh, George Fredrickson, John Lewis Gaddis, and Michael McGerr. Lastly, there were those who finished manuscripts but had them rejected by Woodward: these were Morton Keller for a volume covering 1865 to 1900, Charles Sellers on 1815 to 1848, and Stuart Bruchey on American economic history. (The same has happened on Kennedy's watch to another attempt at doing 1865 to 1900, in this case by H. W. Brands.) A glance at all these names does not indicate much narrowness of vision, for they include many historians sympathetic to social, cultural, and intellectual history. Indeed, for a long time, it was intended that there be a freestanding volume on American intellectual history, but, after Ward's withdrawal in 1971 and a flirtation with Wilson, the idea got lost in the shuffle, though it was still around in the early 1980s. But Woodward always responded favorably when an author expressed a desire to encompass intellectual history, as Fredrickson did.Footnote ³ This ought not to occasion surprise, since Woodward wrote much intellectual history himself and Hofstadter was as much an intellectual historian as anything else.

On the matter of gender, however, both in the sense of incorporating women's and gender history and in the sense of inviting women to write volumes, the documents more than support Burnard's case. Only one woman, Willie Lee Rose, was ever invited to participate and, though she played her part in efforts to advance the cause of women in the profession, she was not a historian of women. Hofstadter's career, of course, ended before the gender issue was placed squarely before American historians, but Woodward's did not and, on the whole, he never grasped the point. In 1963, for example, he ambivalently opposed the election of any woman as a fellow of his Yale college and wrote to its master,

It is also true, as Burnard implies, that Woodward had little time for the linguistic turn. (The term “cultural turn” was not invented until after his death, so perhaps we might excuse his obtuseness on that score.) Further, he became a public opponent of multiculturalism in the 1990s and very exercised about “political correctness” as an issue that, for him, turned on principles of free speech. I would hesitate to agree, however, with the statement that he “moved to the right from the 1960s,” if by “right” one means those who sympathized with Ronald Reagan, neoconservatism, and the like. If anything, as liberals became an endangered species, Woodward became more willing to identify himself as a liberal, a label he had often refused to accept in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1988, he and Fritz Stern sponsored a paid advertisement in the New York Times that might highlight “the threat to liberal principles and traditions that we see in current political rhetoric.”Footnote ⁵ Certainly few conservatives, if any, were willing to see Woodward as even a fellow traveller, in contradistinction to Eugene Genovese, who came regularly to receive accolades from the right and welcome them.

The issue of social history is less straightforward. Neither Woodward nor Hofstadter can be regarded as social historians in the sense that developed in the 1970s, although Hofstadter's last, uncompleted book was America at 1750: A Social Portrait and he had long been deeply influenced by sociology. So I do not find persuasive Burnard's claim that the original editors wanted an “antidote to … social-science histories,” since Hofstadter's The Age of Reform was, in part, just such a history. Woodward, too, wrote a good deal of social history, if only that which was compatible with political, legal, and economic history, and was not averse to encouraging other historians to engage with the new social history. Still, Woodward had his skepticisms, which came to the fore when, in 1983, James McPherson suggested that the Oxford History stretch to a volume and perhaps two on American social history. At first, Woodward was enthusiastic about the idea and wrote to Sheldon Meyer, the OUP editor then in charge of the series, that many authors were having trouble integrating social history into their narratives, yet “it is just in these subjects that there has been the greatest amount of activity and innovation in the last ten years and more.” He added, “If we are going to escape the stigma of being dated and old hat, we will have to find a solution to the question Jim raises.” But then Woodward “had an attack of second thoughts and doubts,” occasioned by a conversation with Edmund Morgan, “who … challenged me to come up with a table of contents.” To this, he told McPherson, “I had to admit that the ‘field’ was poorly defined, unperiodized, fragmented, and rather centrifugal. Interdisciplinary interests tend to scatter rather than unite the components.” To be sure, society had a history and an integrated history of it must be possible, but as yet there were only proliferating subfields, jealous of the obligation to be represented. “Have I lapsed into defeatism?” he asked and, with that unanswered question, the idea died.Footnote ⁶

In one sense, one can see this exchange as strong evidence for Burnard's case. But other pieces of correspondence complicate the picture, for many authors seem to have begun with good intentions of integrating social and cultural history, but found it hard to do and so fell back on political and military history as a manageable framework. Certainly this partly arose because Woodward was insistent that the volumes needed to be integrated, to be more than glorified textbooks. As he put it to Timothy Breen in 1985, “The Oxford enterprise is regarded by editor, publisher, and authors as a timely opportunity to put our fragmented craft back together again and restore a sense of purpose and mastery.” But Fredrickson, in part, abandoned his volume because he was convinced that “we should try harder to synthesize elements of the ‘new’ histories,” but could never figure out how to do it. There was, as he saw it, a fundamental conflict between narrative and analytical history. Daniel Walker Howe wrote to Woodward in 1991, “I still believe that political, diplomatic and military history – that is, the exercise of power – provide the core (the backbone is the better metaphor) of history. Upon this basic framework, the fabric of economic, social, and intellectual developments should be hung.”Footnote ⁷

It is hard to know what to make of this. It may well be that the American authors have too readily punted the issue of integrating social and cultural history, or it may be that the English authors have been more content to shoehorn in the miscellaneous data of social history with more insouciance and are less bothered about “mastery” and resisting fragmentation. But I would, at least, float the suggestion that the problem of integration may not be as straightforward as Burnard tends to suggest. Until either of us have attempted to edit a series such as this, or write for it, we might be wise to be more hesitant in our strictures.

Despite the praiseworthy quality of its individual volumes, which have received “three Pulitzer Prizes, a Bancroft and a Parkman,” the Oxford History of the United States has “serious problems as a series,” in the estimation of Trevor Burnard. This is the kind of contrarian appraisal too often levelled from outside the historical profession, and not often enough within it. Given the prestige of the scholars and press in question, to make such a sweeping negative judgment requires courage and audacity. At issue here, however, is not whether Burnard's censure is bold, but whether it is accurate and proportionate.

According to Burnard, the Oxford History of the United States is less than the sum of its parts. It is far too long on political and military history and much too short on social and cultural history. It is focussed upon “the great men whose exploits are the stuff of history proper” and ignores virtually everything else: “literature, technology, business or science,” the “cultural or linguistic turns,” and “ordinary people.” All in all, the series displays “traditionalism … remarkable for books being published in the twenty-first century.” This primary line of objection is accompanied by a host of lesser criticisms. The publisher's production pace has been “glacial.” The obligatory structure is “narrative.” The volumes are written with less vivaciousness than the New Oxford History of England. The authors exhibit an “Olympian detachment from historical debate,” which they bury in footnotes. There are few tables, and the maps are mostly of battles. Demographic and economic information is scant. The concentration is on national, almost wholly presidential, politics, not state or local matters. The books exhibit an “overly congratulatory interpretation of American history” that starts with the Founders' perfection, charts subsequent moral declensions, and sees war as unifying and redemptive. The resultant “teleological and Whiggish view of history” betrays insecurity: “Americans, one always feels on reading these volumes, need to feel good about themselves and their place in the world.”

The reason for these failings, according to Burnard, lies in “the social and gender composition of the authors.” All are American, white, married men who came of age in the two decades of complacency and prosperity after the Second World War. None is a woman, a southerner, “black, Hispanic, Asian, or even an ethnic Catholic.” Their maleness explains why they write “about the sort of things that stereotypically we think boys are interested in” – politics and war – and pay little heed to women. Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (2007), writes Burnard, is “the only book to deal with feminism.” He laments that “no one involved in the planning of this set of volumes thought fit to include a woman in the list of authors.”

To weigh these many claims, we might begin with the publishing history of the Oxford series. Here we learn, among other things, that the series's protracted timetable is largely explained by all-too-human factors, not laggardness.Footnote ¹ One inaugural editor, Richard Hofstadter, died before any manuscript was submitted for publication. George M. Frederickson and John Lewis Gaddis each began books for the series but abandoned them for other pursuits. Charles Sellers was to write on Jacksonian America, but series editor C. Vann Woodward found the manuscript too heavily economic, so Oxford published it separately as The Market Revolution (1991). A submission on the Gilded Age by Morton Keller was too exclusively political; Harvard published it as Affairs of State (1977). Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick were to write on the early national period through 1815 but did not get beyond 1800; Oxford published it outside the series as The Age of Federalism (1993). Woodward died in 1999, replaced by David M. Kennedy. Such are the interruptions, detours, and complications that may confound any ambitious multivolume series. Writing large synthetic overviews that boil down vast historiographical literatures for a generally educated readership will require years of scholarly labor even in the best of circumstances. It hardly seems just to reprimand Oxford for delays at a moment when the publisher has issued four works in six years, completing two-thirds of the series, with only four instalments remaining.

The publishing history also demonstrates that at least one woman was commissioned to write for the Oxford History of the United States. Willie Lee Rose, a talented southerner who was a highly valued student of Woodward's and a vigorous advocate for women in the historical profession, suffered a stroke in 1978 that prevented her from completing the Civil War book she was under contract to produce; her replacement, James McPherson, contributed the best-selling Battle Cry of Freedom (1988). Finally, it should be noted that Woodward originally projected a freestanding, thematic volume of economic history (analogous to George Herring's diplomatic volume), which might explain inattentiveness to economic coverage in the early books in the series.Footnote ²

What of Burnard's central objection, that military and political history is privileged over social history in the Oxford History of the United States? To examine this thoroughly would require literally thousands of pages of reading, but even a cursory dip may raise an eyebrow. The title of Howe's What Hath God Wrought, one learns on its first page, derives from the words tapped by Samuel Morse in his first telegraph in 1844. Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009) opens with Washington Irving's tale of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep when George III was monarch of British North America, awakening twenty years later. These modes of introduction do not suggest obliviousness to technology or imaginative literature, let alone obsession with political–military history. Opening passages, however, may be mere window dressing, so perhaps a better test is to set Burnard's claims against a close reading, cover to cover, of a single volume in the series.

James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (1996) is governed by a dual thesis: that Americans in the years following the Second World War had “grand expectations” for ever-greater levels of happiness and abundance, and that in these same years a “rights revolution” transformed American society. Had Patterson wished to center upon presidential history, he might have begun with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in 1945, but after a brief preface on the end of the Second World War and the use of the atomic bomb is a first chapter on “Veterans, Ethnics, Blacks, Women,” followed by chapters on “Unions, Liberals, and the State” and “Booms” (on the postwar demographic explosion and economic expansion). Not until page 93 is FDR's death recounted; only on page 137, almost one-fifth of the way through the book, does Patterson finally begin to treat presidential-level policy intricately, in a chapter on Harry S. Truman's first term. To be sure, the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon dominate much of what follows, but that is hardly unexpected given the power of the modern executive branch, first described as the “imperial presidency” in this very period. Another writer might easily have begun with Truman taking office or the Cold War's crystallization. Instead Patterson lays his foundation in social history. It should not be a surprise, then, that women figure often in Patterson's account, from representations of domesticity in Hollywood films of the 1950s to – as one might expect in a work attentive to the “rights revolution” – the feminist movement of the 1960s. Not only does Patterson recount Betty Friedan, the National Organization for Women, and the emergence of women's liberation within the New Left, but he also refers to the Kinsey Report, Playboy, the Mattachine Society, Stonewall, and other aspects of the history of sexuality. Burnard is simply mistaken that no book in the Oxford series but Howe's pays heed to feminism.

The political viewpoint of Grand Expectations, insofar as it is discernable, seems to be a conservative liberalism. Its ordering is chronological but not, by and large, narrative; it includes numerous breakout segments on social and cultural topics, from suburbia to the beats to the environmental movement. The approach is largely descriptive, not explanatory. This may explain why the volume feels encyclopedic in all connotations of the word: expansive in subjects covered, detailed in information provided, and lacking in stylistic effervescence. Its rather ponderous prose sustains Burnard's view that the Oxford series might aspire to more engaging, vivid writing – an estimation not original to him, as he himself notes.Footnote ³ It is hard to imagine, however, that Burnard's suggestions for more tables and less narrative would do the trick. It should be noted that Patterson does flag a number of historiographical controversies over such matters as the decision to drop the bomb, the causes of the baby boom, the nature of the Cold War, the merits of 1960s cultural changes, and Kennedy's course in Vietnam – all treated in the body of the text, not the footnotes. As for military and diplomatic history, Patterson claims that in the Cold War the American sphere of influence “was much more consensual; the Soviets imposed theirs” (89). This might support Burnard's allegation that the series succumbs to self-congratulatory nationalism, but Patterson is critical of American involvement in coups in Guatemala and Iran; and the major war covered in the book, the Vietnam War, hardly fits the type of a unifying, redemptive experience. Although Patterson repeats the misleading official framing of the Vietnam War as an “invasion” by North Vietnam and often refers to “the enemy,” he calls the conflict “the most unpopular war in United States history,” with “large and negative effects on American life” (597). As though it were not dispiriting enough, Vietnam is paired with Watergate, the far-from-triumphal moral episode with which the volume concludes.

In short, Grand Expectations does not sustain Burnard's charge that the Oxford series covers “political leaders and generals almost exclusively.” Nor does it corroborate the claim that “what social history there is in this series is only there to illuminate political themes.” If anything, the volume points to the reverse: political history in Grand Expectations is kept too discrete from social history. To really explain the “rights revolution” requires a feel for the tremendous surge, beginning with the civil rights movement, of activity from below by African Americans, students, anti-war dissenters, women, gays and lesbians, Chicanos, Indians, and the counterculture. Patterson in one way or another acknowledges all of these eruptions and mobilizations, but because his conventional, moderate approach places legislative and juridical history at a remove from them, he awards insufficient credit to radical social movements for the transformation of American law, politics, and culture between the 1950s and the 1970s. Patterson attributes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, to Lyndon Baines Johnson's persuasion of Congress, not to the crises of conscience and society generated by the civil rights movement; the deaths of three civil rights activists in Mississippi, although chronologically prior to the Civil Rights Act, are described later.

Some humility, however, is in order. As any teacher of the broad American introductory historical survey knows, it is a serious challenge to harmonize the varied demands of political, military, social, and cultural history within a coherent holistic interpretation. The syntheses that have been undertaken from the left, including Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980), have their own inadequacies. This suggests that Burnard would have done well to listen to the inner voice that cautioned him against “simplistic sociological judgements” rather than to engage in argumentum ad hominem by making viewpoint and merit a function of identity. The claim that the Oxford series's deficiencies issue from its writers' age, race, and sex – a thin sheet of ice indeed for any white male historian to skate upon – makes biology scholarly destiny. But not all white male historians, even of a certain age cohort, adhere to methodological or political conservatism. Men from Carl Degler to William Chafe made signal early contributions to the writing of women's history, and admirable syntheses of political and social history have been written by Eric Foner, Ira Berlin, and Leon Litwack, all born in the same period as the authors of the Oxford series.

Any serious historical enterprise aimed at a general readership now confronts a baleful cultural context, namely a society so ignorant of its past that it has all but ceased to think historically. Among Americans, ritualistic obeisance to the Constitution now coexists with near-universal ignorance of the basic facts about the country's birth. Although Americans consider knowledge of the American Revolution to be important, for example, 82 percent failed a recent twenty-seven-question examination on it.Footnote ⁴ More than one-third could not place the Revolution in the correct century. Half thought that the Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, or War of 1812 occurred before the Revolution. Less than half could identify the Second Continental Congress as the body that declared independence from Great Britain; 20 percent credited the House of Commons, a British institution. Most thought that the Boston Tea Party of 1773 resulted in repeal of the tea tax, not Parliament's passage of sterner measures – the Coercive or Intolerable Acts, as colonists called them. Fewer Americans know that James Madison was drafter of the Constitution or Alexander Hamilton first secretary of the Treasury than that Michael Jackson was the singer of “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.”

Such results indicate the narcissism of advanced capitalist consumer culture.Footnote ⁵ They also reflect severely widening inequalities in wealth and power. Ordinary Americans are historically illiterate for the same reason they are financially illiterate. Lacking in power and money, they have little need for either historical or financial knowledge, at least not in the forms put to them. The sole demographic groups to score better than 50 percent overall on the American Revolution test were the college-educated and those earning more than $100,000. Americans who work at the massive retailer Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer for some time now, can ill afford health care, let alone Oxford University Press books, nor do they have time while holding down two or three jobs to read a tome.Footnote ⁶ Can we really blame most Americans for finding the information tested in historical surveys arcane and antiquarian, of little meaning or value to their daily lives?

The crisis of history is indicative of a crisis of society. It will not be solved by polemics of social historians against political and military historians, for that would merely invite polemic in the opposite direction. After all, the collapse of Americans' elementary knowledge of political history coincides with the rise of social history in the universities. Of course, coincidence need not imply correlation, let alone causality. That Americans do not know their early past is no more the fault of Gary Nash or Edward Countryman than of Robert Middlekauff or Gordon Wood. All of us in every field – political, social, intellectual, cultural, military, and economic – have Herculean, and perhaps Sisyphean, tasks before us. By the very nature of our craft, we have trouble engaging a public that increasingly thinks in 140-character tweets, not 790-page opuses.

Given linkages of class and historical knowledge, this endeavour may ultimately hinge more upon social and cultural reconstruction than upon literary skill. But writing will play its part. We need imaginative new forms of historical prose that work with the public's appreciation of narrative rather than disdain it and convey the whole of the past in vivid, compelling prose, all while transcending narrow academic boundary lines. It may well be that the Oxford History of the United States does not fill all of these needs satisfactorily, but few works do – and the Oxford series does so better than Burnard allows. In addition to library patrons and book-club subscribers, the natural audience for such high historical popularizations are teachers in American middle schools, high schools, community colleges, and universities. If some of them read the Oxford series and manage to make use of its abundant facts, stories, and observations to catch the interest of students for whom history at present has little meaning, it is hardly to be deplored. Those among us capable of writing more lively, more compelling, and more authoritative comprehensive histories should, by all means, write them.

I am grateful to Micki McElya, Michael O'Brien and Christopher Phelps for their extraordinary thoughtful responses to my article on my response, as an academic historian but also a reader, to an extremely distinguished set of books. My aim in evaluating the Oxford History of the United States as a whole was, as Phelps suggests, to make the sort of appraisal usually done outside the historical profession of a book series that, as McElya notes, is of epic proportions and intentions. I agree with most of the responses. And I do not think it would serve much purpose in debating every point where I slightly demur from what my respondents have written. What is important is that we have in this journal a rich set of responses to one of the more significant publishing events concerned with American history.

I would like, however, to clarify some points. First, while O'Brien is right to argue that the editors of such a series do not have an easy task and that there is always a gap between conception and accomplishment when editors give authors leeway to write their books as they see fit, I believe that it is useful to hear back from readers about whether they think the editors achieved their intended purpose. I do not think anyone has done that yet and I think, having read, in one long weekend stretch, each volume from cover to cover, that I was able to discern some underlying patterns in the series that have not been picked up in the generally laudatory reviews of individual volumes. My argument is that when you read each book in the series written so far certain themes stand out – and that some of these themes are historiographically problematic. One of these themes is inattention to gender. I have stressed the remarkable absence of women as writers of books in the series (which is even worse than I thought, given that, by O'Brien's account, there were at least another thirty men and just one woman approached to write volumes in the series, alongside the twelve contracted authors). I argued that the lack of attention given to gender in the series is unsurprising given this authorial gender imbalance. But I would not want to go further than that into claiming that biology is scholarly destiny. I agree with Phelps that not all white men, even men of a certain age cohort, necessarily adhere to gender blindness or to methodological or political conservatism (though in this case the correct formulation is, as O'Brien and Phelps carefully note, conservative liberalism). I do not want to claim that kind of historical determinism that O'Brien and Phelps think I slip into, although I am very sympathetic to McElya's citation of Joan Wallach Scott's belief that the sort of high politics favoured in much of this series is itself gendered and agree with McElya that thinking of the history of the public sphere – political, military, diplomatic (the stuff of “proper history,” as Daniel Walker Howe old-fashionably asserted to C. Vann Woodward in 1991) – as being separable from the history of the private sphere is intellectually unsustainable.

What I do argue is that this particular group of men, following down guidelines put down by Woodward, adhere to a historiographical conservative liberalism where they believe, along with Howe, that the ‘exercise of power’ remains the core, or backbone, of history. This view removes gender largely from the narrative. O'Brien's response is particularly valuable in providing the context within which Woodward shaped his understanding of the Oxford series. I admit that I did not consider as fully as I ought to have done the influence of Richard Hofstadter on the conception of the series. Nevertheless, I think that it was Woodward, more than anyone else, who shaped his writers' understanding of the type of history that Oxford wanted written. David Kennedy has continued in the vein that Woodward started. One can only speculate on how Hofstadter might have moderated Woodward's views if he had lived but I think, especially from the open-minded quotation O'Brien cites from him in 1959 and from his willingness to embrace the “new” social history in his last unfinished book of 1970, that he may have softened what McElya rightly describes as Woodward's deep resistance to changes in the profession, its practices, and its practitioners.

Woodward was not, as O'Brien is correct to insist, right-wing in the sense of being politically conservative, although in his suspicion of multiculturalism and in his attitudes to women he reflected opinions that by the 1980s historians even of his generation seldom still held. O'Brien's fascinating quotation outlining Woodward's deeply reactionary views, even by the standards of 1963, on how women should contribute to the “felicity” of New Haven nightlife, such as it was, rather than participate in the “monastic” rituals of academia reminds us of just what the few women academics who were in universities before the women's rights movement had to put up with. What I would like to stress, however, is that the choice Woodward made to reject social history as a “field” (the quotation marks here are particularly revealing), which he thought “poorly defined, unperiodized, fragmented, and rather centrifugal,” was not a choice which either he had to make or other senior white men in the historical profession were making in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I have written this response at two locations. The first is Paris, where I am giving a talk at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, the famous French centre for advanced learning and the heart of the Annaliste movement that transformed historiography after World War II. The second is Philadelphia, a leading American locus of activity in social history, where I am giving a talk in honour of a book published in 2010 by Lorena Walsh, the doyenne of the Chesapeake school in early American studies, a school which flourished especially in the 1970s.Footnote ¹ If one goes into the office of the director of EHESS, currently François Weil, the first director to be a specialist in the history of the United States, one sees on his wall a marvellous poster advertising the directeurs of seminars at EHESS in the mid-1970s.Footnote ² It is a storied list of names. Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, François Furet, Pierre Nora, Marc Ferro, and a young Roger Chartier were some of the great historians who worked at EHESS in this period. All are white men, most of roughly the same age as the authors of the books in the Oxford series. Still around was the legendary figure of Fernand Braudel, a man from Woodward's generation. The types of history they were writing, however, were radically different from those favoured by Woodward. They would have found the problems that Woodward seemed to have in integrating social history with political history mystifying. They would have found just as mystifying his belief that the rise of new social history, as McElya quotes Woodward, had led social historians to be indifferent to the needs of the layman (the use of this word rather than the more inclusive layperson in itself telling), rejecting good storytelling in the process. After all, the publishing phenomenon of that period was Ladurie's extraordinary re-creation of the social lives of the villagers of Montaillou, a work deeply informed by the Annaliste movement.Footnote ³

Social history was not unpopular with the reading public. In Italy, a year after Montaillou was published, Carlo Ginzburg published another groundbreaking work of social history, The Cheese and the Worms, to popular acclaim. In America, Natalie Zemon Davis published in 1983, one year after Woodward's lamentations about the deficiencies of social history in the New York Review of Books, a best-selling account of Martin Guerre, a Renaissance conman. And, as I have noted above, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich achieved great popular and academic success a few years later with her microhistory of a Maine midwife. Mentioning Ulrich, a historian of early America, raises an issue worth discussing.Footnote ⁴ Perhaps it is easy for a colonial British American historian to be puzzled as to why historians of later periods of American history found it difficult to incorporate social history into master narratives. Colonial British American historians in the early 1980s concerned, like Woodward, about the fragmentation of the craft of history writing thought that variants of social history were the ways in which a disparate set of writings could be unified into coherent syntheses. Bernard Bailyn, for example, had challenged the American historical profession in 1981 about the dangers of overspecialization, indifference to the layman, and unconcern with connecting “narrow” scholarship to wider trends in scholarship. His response, however, was to not to fall back into political and military history as a manageable framework for synthesis. He decided to hitch his star to the developing field of Atlantic history, publishing in 1986 the Pulitzer Prize-winning social history of migration into pre-Revolutionary America, Voyagers to the West. Other major colonial British American scholars like Jack P. Greene and David Hackett Fischer also wrote syntheses of early American history in this period in which the insights of social historians provided the scaffolding for their interpretations.Footnote ⁵

In short, even as the Oxford history series was being conceived a range of historians, in America and in Europe, were showing that histories could be written in which the “analytical” and the “narrative” were not inherently opposed methodologies. In saying this, I do not want to try and assert that all narratives of the American past have to start from a social-history perspective. That would just replace one narrow way of conceiving the past with another equally narrow way of thinking about history. But I do contest the view in the Oxford History of the United States that there is a fundamental conflict between narrative and analytical history (or, as McElya insists, between several kinds of narrative history) and that members of the lay public can only get to understand a “sense of mastery and purpose” in history writing through detailed chronological narratives framed around political and military history.

Here I dissent from Phelps's lament about the general historical ignorance of the American public. In a world where knowledge is abundant and where schoolchildren are, rightly in my view, not taught the rote learning of facts that was customary in the past,Footnote ⁶ people who do not occupy our rarefied world as professional history teachers and researchers often do not know American history in specific detail. I am on the side of those who do not think that we need to return in school history curricula to creating, as Simon Schama argues for England, citizens “who grow up with a sense of our shared memory as a living, urgently present body of knowledge.”Footnote ⁷ I think that considering our reading audience to be so ignorant of its past as to cease to think historically is a partial view of contemporary appetites for history. The reading public, especially the younger members of that public, downloading books, blogs and other methods of communication onto electronic devices, may not know what we want them to know, such as when the American Revolution occurred. Finding out such dates is what Wikipedia is for. But they are very interested in other things, many of which have a strong historical dimension. It is just not the history of great men, wars and high politics that the authors of the Oxford History of the United States think people ought to be interested in which interest a considerable number of our students and the educated lay public. The history course in my university that draws in most students (the vast majority not history majors) is The Ecological History of Humanity. The books that I see on people's bookshelves are works like Jared Diamond's best-selling world histories explaining the geographical determinants of rising and falling civilizations. It is noteworthy, I believe, that the three short-listed books for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction were an analysis of the dangers of the arms race, an explanation of how markets fail and an exposition on the evolution of God.Footnote ⁸ The general public are at least as interested in topics of this sort as they are in narrowly conceived political and military histories of the nation-state. I feel that there is a danger that as our attention turns to such things as globalization, the persistence of inequality, and the threat of climate change to human existence a history series predicated on a set of questionable assumptions formed in a very different age by members of an age cohort with less invested in the new questions of the twenty-first century than people born in this century can become outmoded even as it is published. In short, I see the Oxford History of the United States less as a monument to the ages than as an idiosyncratic reflection of a particular set of anxieties that were important to a few people at a specific historic moment. That moment, I believe, was over a long time ago. The audience wanting general narratives of the American past may want different things than what the Oxford series provides.