The Challenges of Democracy: James Harvey Robinson, the New History, and Adult Education for Citizenship

Mention James Harvey Robinson and most students of American history will think two words: “New History.” Robinson tried to articulate what better-known historians of the period – Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington – were doing in their research and writing. As Richard Hofstadter explained, the leading historians of the Progressive Era tried “to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment.…They attempted to find a usable past related to the broadest needs of a nation fully launched upon its own industrialization, and to make history an active instrument of self-recognition and self-improvement.” Situated firmly in the “revolt against formalism” that marked Progressive Era intellectual work, historians made their research instrumental, teasing out what William James called the “cash value” of ideas. Historical writing could no longer, in Robinson's own words, “catalogue mere names of person and places which have not the least importance for the reader.” Rather, it had to “help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind.” In those words and his pioneering (though largely forgotten) work in European and intellectual history, Robinson codified the purpose of what has come to be known as Progressive history.