Thursday, October 25, 2007

Lepore on American History

Jill Lepore, becoming an interesting contributor on American history to the New Yorker, has an impressive essay here on two big books with big competing interpretations of the evolution of the United States between 1815 and 1848.

Can't help wishing we had controversies on this scale in Canadian history. But I'm also struck by her suggestion that both these big-picture syntheses were a deliberate reaction by historians to the earlier trend to the writing of micro-histories, which she describes as often brilliant but also as pieces of a puzzle no one can put together.
 
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