Page "Henry Steele Commager" Paragraph 10

Commager felt a duty as a professional historian to reach out to his fellow citizens.

He believed that an educated public that understands American history would support liberal programs, especially internationalism and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He downplayed the tedium of scholarly analysis in favor of sweeping interpretations of grand historical events, while at the same time providing easy access to primary sources so that people could study history for themselves.

Commager was representative of a whole generation of like-minded historians who were widely read by the general public, including Samuel Eliot Morison, Allan Nevins, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and C. Vann Woodward.

Commager's biographer Neil Jumonville has argued that this style of influential public history has been lost in the 21st century because political correctness has rejected Commager's open marketplace of tough ideas.

Jumonville says history now comprises abstruse deconstruction by experts, with statistics instead of stories, and is now comprehensible only to the initiated, with ethnocentrism ruling in place of common identity.