In this sense, as Croce said, all history is contemporary history. So the crises and crusades of our own age constrain historians to look in new ways at what had gone on before. In my lifetime, the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement have revolutionized American history. Writing The Age of Jackson nearly sixty years ago, I was concerned with issues of social and economic power and of the dilemmas of democratic capitalism made vivid for my generation by Franklin D Roosevelt and his New Deal. Responding to the felt pressures of my own time, I underplayed other aspects of the Jacksonian era, such as the treatment of blacks and of Indians.
New times produce new contexts and new perspectives.
Contemporary scholars, their consciousness raised by passions of their own age, bring into their focus the history of women, of children, of blacks, of Indians, of Latinos, of homosexuals. New voices ring out of the historical darkness, and we discover new issues in our history, and in ourselves. It is these permutations of consciousness that make history so endlessly fascinating an intellectual adventure. The American National Biography rewrites our history according to the most searching standards of the end of the 20th century. The ANB , as scholars will soon know it, casts its net farther than its distinguished predecessor.