Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
“Any basic interpretation of American history,” one prominent historian contends, “will have to account for…the coming of the Civil War.” Yet the two basic interpretations that have dominated the study of American politics, the progressive and consensus paradigms, have spawned partial and unsatisfactory explanations for what is arguably the most central event in the American past. After briefly analyzing the insights and limitations of these approaches to the Civil War, we propose an alternative perspective: cultural theory.
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8 Consensus theory, as articulated by Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin, stressed American uniqueness, distinguishing American consensus from the ideological class conflict of European nations. In this paper, however, the consensus paradigm is intended to designate all analyses which begin with an assumption that the United States is characterized by a basic consensus on values, regardless of whether this makes America unique from—or similar to—other nations. By this expanded definition, those Civil War historians usually IL eled “revisionists,” such as Avery Craven, Roy Nichols, and J. G. Randall fall within the consensus paradigm.
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13 We recognize that what we label as “culture” is not everyone's idea of culture. If the reader feels that our use of the term is presumptuous, he or she should feel free to substitute the more precise if less felicitous phrase, “grid-group theory.”
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