The term says less about ideology than it does about passion for social change and critical distance from the centers of power. It also captures what about those years made me and so many others into historians. History doesn't always move at the same rate. For our students, history has moved so slowly that they must have great imagination to believe that it moves at all. They understand that human beings are always making their own history, regardless of their place in the social and economic hierarchy of their day.
Students tend to use it as a slogan.
The notion of historical agency may need itself to be placed into history, treated historiographically, kept lively. When thinking about what my generation of American historians has actually done, I am heartened. The substance of and approach to American history is so dramatically different from the unreflective, top-down, soporific national history that people my age were raised on that almost nothing of the old ways is left. And I mean this to describe not just what happens in the classroom and in our own journals and conferences, but in the world of public history, which is more vital and popular than I ever imagined it would be. Historical museum exhibits and documentary film projects are proliferating and provocative.