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Title from caption. ; Suspended, July-Aug. 1938. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Published: New York Times Co., Mar. 1916-Apr. 1936 ; Current History, Inc., May 1936-Feb. 1939 ; C-H Pub. Corp., Mar. 1939-June 1940. ; Merged with: Forum and century, to form: Current history & forum. ; UCLA Library - CDL shared resource. ; UPDATED

Has any question about the historical past ever been finally answered? Of course there is much disagreement among professional historians about what happened in the past and how to explain it. But this incisive study goes one step further and brings into question the very ability of historians to gather and communicate genuine knowledge about the past.Understanding History applies this general question from the philosophy of history to economic history of American slaveholders. Do we understand the American slaveholders? Has the last word on the subject been said? Both the alleged "profitability" of slavery and the purported causes of the American Civil War are philosophically analyzed. Traditional narrative history and econometric history are examined and compared, and their different philosophical assumptions made explicit. The problem of justifying historical methodologies is first set in the wider context of the philosophical problem of knowledge, then lucidly explained and resolved along pragmatic lines. The novelty of Gorman's approach lies in its comparison of narrative with econometric history, its analysis of empathetic understanding in terms of cost-benefit analysis, and its elucidation of the metaphysical presuppositions of empiricism. It stands out especially for the clarity, rigor, and simplicity of its arguments.

It is difficult to imagine two fields of scholarly inquiry with so much in common and yet so little interaction as diplomatic and policy history. Policy, policy process, policymakers, policy origins, policy intentions, policy consequences—those terms and ones of a similar stripe roll just as easily off the tongues and word processors of diplomatic historians as of self-described policy historians. Moreover, the questions asked and the methods employed by the two groups of scholars bear a striking resemblance. Both fields focus perforce on the state and state-centered actors, concern themselves with elite-level decision making, interrogate fundamental issues of power within societies, and concentrate overwhelmingly on the twentieth century to the relative neglect of earlier periods. Each field occupies as well an embattled position within the larger historical profession, where social and cultural history have predominated since the 1960s.

As 'ethnic' history — the nation-to-ethnic-ghetto version of migrant strategies — came to include the process of migration and the socialization, the 'roots' of the field were still traced to the Chicago School and Oscar Handlin. European scholarship in the initial stages centred on emigration to North America and followed us approaches. I discuss, to the 1950s, European and Canadian epistemologies of the field and briefly refer to research in other parts of the world. The essays discuss neglected, theoretically and conceptually complex origins of migration studies and history in the us: (1) the Chicago Women's School of Sociology of Hull House reformers and women economists from the 1880s and the cluster of interdisciplinary scholars at Columbia University (Franz Boas et al.); (2) scholars at the University of Minnesota who included the migrants' societies of origin; as well as (3) scholars in California (Bogardus, social distance scale) and (4) British Columbia who recovered data collected in the 1920s and read them in modern multicultural perspectives. Against these many threads the emphasis by Chicago scholars, E. Park in particular, and O. Handlin on disorganization and 'marginal men' are assessed.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction to the Transaction Edition -- Preface: The Abuses of History -- Part I: Personal Reflections on a Calling -- Chapter 1. A Discipline in Crisis -- Chapter 2. Living in a Valley -- Part II: The Central Themes of American History -- Chapter 3. A History of American History -- Chapter 4. Theories of Historical Interpretation -- Chapter 5. Historical Criticism -- Chapter 6. An Instance of Criticism -- Part III: Dealing with the Evidence -- Chapter 7. How to Read a Word -- Chapter 8. How to Count a Number -- Chapter 9. Seeing and Hearing -- Chapter 10. History in a World of Knowledge -- Part IV: Persistent Themes and Hard Facts -- Chapter 11. Political Theory and Popular Thought -- Chapter 12. Man and Magic -- Chapter 13. Good Guys and Bad -- Chapter 14. The Two-Party System -- Part V: The Uses of History -- Chapter 15. The Diet of a Ravenous Public -- Chapter 16. Ethnicity and the New History -- Chapter 17. The Uses of History -- Acknowledgments -- Index