I just finished reading Washington’s Crossing, part of the “Pivotal Moments in American History” series published by Oxford University Press, and written by David Hackett Fischer.
The book is about the battle of Trenton and the winter campaign of 1776-77. I don’t intend to go into a thorough review here, but it was excellent. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Revolutionary War or early American history.
Although not part of the book itself, the “Historiography” section included as an appendix at the end makes for fascinating reading for anyone interested in the continued importance and relevance of history. Although not related directly to the subject of the book, this short excerpt from that section is a excellent example of Fischer’s vivid style:
A similar mood [i.e historical revisionism] spread among a troubled generation of academic historians who were born in the baby boom (ca. 1941-57). They came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, when a youth revolution was bright with the promise of a new age. It was a revolution that failed in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, burning cities, and blighted hopes. A conservative revival followed, in which Republicans moved to the right, liberal Democrats shifted toward the center, and many on the left sought sanctuary in American universities as internal exiles from a society that turned away from them.In the 1980s some of these internal exiles rejected all politics. Others increasingly called themselves American Marxists and predicted the coming collapse of capitalism. Then came the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union instead, and the failure of Marxism throughout the world. It was a double disaster for the American left. The result was an angry generation of academic iconoclasts, disillusioned by the failure of radical movements, alienated from American institutions, and filled with cultural despair. When the light of their revolution failed, some of them could see nothing but darkness.
More than a few became historians. Some ex-Marxists became historical relativists who beat their dialectical swords into epistemological ploughshares, and rejected ideals of objective and empirical inquiry. They judged other works mainly by ideological standards of political incorrectness such as racism, sexism, and elitism. Any work with a positive tone about the United States was condemned as “triumphalism.” Their writings expressed intense hostility to American institutions and alienation from the main lines of American history. [pp. 453-454]
I thought this was one of the most brilliant observations in the entire book, but the rest of it was consistently nearly as brilliant and certainly worth reading.
Although many left-leaning readers might tend to disagree strongly with some of his observations (such as the excerpt above), Fischer’s lively narrative and insightful conclusions make this book worth reading for any student of history.
