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C. VANN WOODWARD

in a war decision is rendered most unmeaningful at the very time
popular involvement in the devastation of war has reached an
precedented maximum.

The history of war and man's attitudes about it should be re-
examined in the light of these developments. Attention has already
been profitably directed in particular to the question of how and
why total war came to appear the "normal" type of conflict
between major powers.¹³ Such investigation might reveal how
military planning became divorced from political planning and
war became an end in itself rather than a means of achieving more
or less rational political ends. Given the destructive military
capabilities presently at the disposal of major powers, it would
seem to be more interesting than it has ever been before to learn
how and why powers have been willing at some times in history
to wage wars with more limited objectives than unconditional
surrender, total victory, or complete annihilation of the enemy.

That mankind should have carried the values and precepts of
the age of firearms into the thermonuclear age represents a far
greater anachronism than the one represented by his carrying the
values and precepts of the age of chivalry into the age of firearms.
Anachronisms are pre-eminently the business of historians. The
historic service that Cervantes performed with mockery in 1605,
when he published the first volume of *Don Quixote*, three centuries
after the advent of firearms, cannot with safety be deferred that
long after the advent of nuclear weapons. Lacking a Cervantes,
historians might with their own methods help to expose what may
well be the most perilous anachronism in history.

On a grander scale, a third field of opportunity for historical
reinterpretation has opened up since 1945. Too complex to be
attributed to an event, it might better be ascribed to an avalanche
of events, or a combination of avalanches. These avalanches go
under such names as the collapse of Western imperialism, the
revolt of the colored peoples of Asia and Africa, the rise of Eastern
nationalism, the westward advance of the frontier of Russian

¹³ See, for example, Robert E. Osgood, *Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy* (Chicago, 1957), and John U. Nef, *War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization* (Cambridge, 1950).

[L]

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION

15

hegemony, and the polarization of power between the Russian and American giants. All these developments and more have contributed to the shrinkage of Europe in power and relative importance, and thus to what is probably the greatest of all opportunities for historical reinterpretation.

In recent years historians and other scholars have coined some striking phrases to describe Europe's plight: "the political collapse of Europe," "the un-making of Europe," "farewell to European history," "the passing of the European age," "the end of European history."¹⁴ The tone of despair echoed from one of these phrases to another may well be called in question by the remarkable economic recovery and cultural resilience of Europe since 1945. Crane Brinton is to an extent justified in taking to task the prophets of doom and calling attention to the rising birth rate, the material prosperity, and the intellectual activity in postwar Europe.¹⁵ The end of European supremacy is not necessarily the end of Europe. The present argument, however, is not addressed to the question of the extent of cultural malaise in Europe nor to the validity of any of several cyclical theories of history. The point is simply one of relative power and influence, and no evidence so far presented disturbs the conclusion that an age of European pre-eminence in the world has come to a close. That age did not end overnight, nor does the explanation lie wholly in events of the last decade and a half, but awareness of the implications for history are only beginning to sink in.

Now that European power has dwindled or quite disappeared in Asia, Africa, and former insular dependencies, and now that Europe itself has become the theater for operations of non-European powers, their military bases, and power rivalries, the spell of an agelong European dominance begins to lift. It is difficult to realize how recently it was commonly assumed in informed circles that the world was the proper theater for European enterprises and ad-

¹⁴ Hajo Holborn, *The Political Collapse of Europe* (New York, 1951); Oscar Halecki, *The Limits and Divisions of European History* (New York, 1950); Alfred Weber, *Farewell to European History or the Conquest of Nihilism* (New Haven, 1948); Eric Fischer, *The Passing of the European Age* (Cambridge, 1948); Geoffrey Barraclough, *History in a Changing World* (Norman, 1956).

¹⁵ Crane Brinton, *The Temper of Western Europe* (Cambridge, 1953).

16

C. VANN WOODWARD

ventures, that world leadership was a European prerogative, that trends and fashions in arts, ideas, and sciences were as a matter of course set in Europe, that European political hegemony and economic ascendancy were taken for granted, and that history of any consequence was a commodity stamped, "Made in Europe." The corollaries of these assumptions were that non-Europeans, apart from a few societies composed primarily of peoples of European stock, stood in perpetual tutelage to Europe, that non-European cultures were decadent, arrested, primitive, or permanently inferior, and that progress was defined as successful imitation of the preferred European way of doing things.

The significance of all this for historiography lies in the fact that much of the history still read and believed and taught was written while these assumptions prevailed, and written by historians, non-European as well as European, who shared them. Three of the most productive and influential generations of historians in the whole history of Western culture, those between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, coincided in time with the crest of European ascendancy and presumption. The generation between the world wars of the twentieth century generally shared the same assumptions. The contribution they made to the enrichment of historical scholarship is invaluable and should be cherished. But in so far as it rests on a set of assumptions no longer tenable, their work would seem to stand in need of extensive revision and reinterpretation.

On the needs for reinterpretation of the history of Europe itself it might be the prudent thing for an American historian to rely on the judgment of European historians, several of whom have already expressed themselves on the subject. Geoffrey Barraclough, for example, believes that "a total revision of European history [is] imperative." In this connection he has written, "Ever since the end of the war [of 1939-1945] a change has come over our conceptions of modern history. We no longer feel that we stand four square in a continuous tradition, and the view of history we have inherited . . . seems to have little relevance to our current problems and our current needs." In his opinion the trouble is that "we are dealing with a conception of European history which is out of focus and therefore misleading, because of the false emphasis and

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION

17

isolated prominence it gives to Western Europe, and which therefore needs revising not merely in its recent phases, but at every turn from the early middle ages onward."¹⁶

American historians will also have some reinterpreting to do, for in this as in so much of American cultural life, ideas were shaped by European examples and models. It should go without saying that American civilization is European derived. But the models of Europe-centered world history would seem to have restrained American historians from exploring the influence of their country upon European history and that of the world in general. There have been a few exceptions to the rule. One exception is R. R. Palmer, *The Age of the Democratic Revolution*, which demonstrates that an age traditionally called European shows the profound impact of the American Revolution on Europe. Another suggestive interpretation of the American influence on European history is Walter P. Webb, *The Great Frontier*, and yet another is Halvdan Koht, *The American Spirit in Europe*. Other neglected American themes of European history remain to be explored. The influence of European immigration on American history has received much attention. But the impact upon Europe itself of the emigration of 35,000,000 Europeans in the century between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I remains to be acknowledged except in a few countries and has still to receive its just share of attention in the pages of European history. The importance of the West as a safety valve for American society has undoubtedly been exaggerated. But the significance of America as a safety valve for Europe and the effect of the closing of that valve after World War I remain to be fully assessed. Apart from the United States, other offshoots and overseas establishments of European powers, including those in South America, Australia, and the British Commonwealth countries, will inevitably discover that they have not been merely on the receiving end of the line of influence, but have had their own impact upon European and world history.

The same assumptions of Europocentric history have very largely shaped the interpretation of Asiatic, African, and other non-European history as well, for Europe successfully marketed its

¹⁶ Barraclough, *History in a Changing World*, pp. 9, 135, 178.

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C. VANN WOODWARD

historiography abroad, along with its other cultural products, in
remote and exotic climates. We may depend on it that the new
opportunities for reinterpretation will not be lost upon New Delhi,
Cairo, Tokyo, and Djakarta, to say nothing of Peking and Moscow.
Already an Indian historian, K. M. Panikkar, has defined the period
of European pre-eminence in the Orient as "the Vasco Da Gama
Epoch of Asian History." It began with the arrival of Da Gama at
Calicut in 1498 and ended abruptly four and a half centuries later
"with the withdrawal of British forces from India in 1947 and of
the European navies from China in 1949." In the time dimensions
of the Orient this could be regarded as only one of several episodes
that have temporarily interrupted the flow of ancient civilizations.
Relations between East and West continue and even increase in
many ways, but, as Panikkar says, "the essential difference is that
the basis of relationship has undergone a complete change... a
revolutionary and qualitative change..." The Indian historian
concludes that "vitally important historical results may flow from
this new confrontation" between East and West.¹⁷

One of the historical results to flow from the confrontation be-
tween East and West should be a new and revised view of world
history. The ethnocentric, or Europocentric, view that has been
held for so long a time in the West can hardly be expected to
survive the sweeping change in East-West relationships. The "new
confrontation" of which the Hindu historian writes is another
event of the present that necessitates many reinterpretations of
the past.

Three fields for historical reinterpretation have been suggested: the first occasioned by the end of the age of free and effective security in America, the second by the end of an age of mass warfare, and the third by the end of the age of European hegemony. These subjects have been suggested to illustrate, not to exhaust, the list of possibilities for historical reinterpretation opened up since 1945. A complete list would not only be beyond the limits of this paper, but beyond the range of present vision. The need for reinterpretation is not always made immediately apparent by revolu-

¹⁷ K. M. Panikkar, *Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498-1945* (London, 1953), pp. 11, 15.

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION

19

tionary events, while on the other hand such a need may easily be
exaggerated by lack of sufficient perspective.

It may be noted that the ideological war between the Communist
and the non-Communist worlds, which occupies so large a share
of public attention at present, has not been mentioned. It could
well be that the cold war and the triumphs that Russia and her
allies have scored will upset more comfortable and traditional
interpretations of history than the events we have listed above. It
is even more probable, if we prove as myopic about our own times
as historians have proved in the past, that we have overlooked or
underestimated events that in future times will be accounted of
far more historical significance than the noisier events we have
noted. In such a situation the experienced historian will always
take account of two powerful historical forces: the unforeseen and
the unforeseeable. It may well turn out that new satellites for the
earth will prove of more historical consequence than new satellites
for earthly powers.

At least two objections to the proposal of reinterpreting history
in the light of present events, however revolutionary, may be
readily foreseen. The first is that the past is inviolable, that it is or
should be unaffected by the present, and that it is the duty of the
historian to guard its inviolability rather than to invade it with
present preoccupations. But this would be to take an unhistorical
view of historiography. Every major historical event has necessitated
new views of the past and resulted in reinterpretations of history.
This was surely true of the Reformation, of the discovery and ex-
ploration of the New World, of the Industrial Revolution, and of
political upheavals such as the democratic and the Communist
revolutions. These events did not leave the past inviolate, nor the
traditional interpretations of it sacrosanct. There is no reason to
believe that present and future revolutions will do so.

A second objection may be that if the revolutionary changes used
as illustrations represent such a drastic and sharp break with the
past, they render history irrelevant and useless to the needs and
concerns of the present and future: that history is bypassed by
events and reduced to antiquarianism. The answer to this objection
is that if history is bypassed and rendered irrelevant and anti-
quarian, it will be due in large measure to the view that historians

20

C. VANN WOODWARD

take of their own craft. Writing nearly half a century ago with regard to the disappearance of free land and its consequences in America, J. Franklin Jameson asked, "Can it be supposed that so great and so dramatic a transition . . . shall have no effect upon the questions which men ask concerning the past? Nothing can be more certain than that history must be prepared to respond to new demands. I do not think so ill of my profession as to suppose that American historians will not make gallant and intelligent attempts to meet the new requirements."¹⁸

The new demands and requirements to which Jameson urged historians to respond now come faster, more insistently, and in more momentous form than ever before. The historian, along with others, may be called upon soon to adjust his views to another age of discovery and exploration, one that transcends earthly limits. He is already confronted with a "population explosion" for which there is no precedent, not even a helpful analogy, and little but misleading counsel from classical theorists. In science and technology it is the age of the "breakthrough," when the curve of expansion suddenly becomes vertical on many fronts. Informed men of science speak of the possibility of tapping the ocean for unlimited food supplies, of curing the incurable diseases, of controlling the weather, and of developing limitless and virtually costless sources of power. Historical thought is involved as soon as men confront change with anachronistic notions of the past. Anachronism, to repeat, is the special concern of the historian. If historians assume an intransigent attitude toward reinterpretation, they will deserve to be regarded as antiquarians and their history as irrelevant. The historian who can contemplate a single nuclear bomb that harbors more destructive energy and fury than man- kind has managed to exert in all previous wars from the siege of Troy to the fall of Berlin and conclude that it has "no effect upon the questions which men ask concerning the past" would seem to be singularly deficient in historical imagination.

The present generation of historians has a special obligation and a unique opportunity. Every generation, of course, has a

¹⁸ J. Franklin Jameson, "The Future Uses of History" (1913), reprinted in *American Historical Review*, LXV (Oct. 1959), 69.

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION

21

unique experience of history. "I had the advantage," wrote Goethe, "of being born in a time when the world was agitated by great movements, which have continued during my long life." But it is doubtful that any previous generation has witnessed quite the sweep and scope of change experienced by those who have a living memory of the two world wars of the twentieth century and the events that have followed. They carry with them into the new order a personal experience of the old. Americans among them will remember a time when security was assumed to be a natural right, free and unchallengeable. Among them also will be men of many nations who manned the ships and fought the battles of another age of warfare. And nearly all of this generation of historians will have been educated to believe that European culture was Civilization and that non-European races, if not natively inferior, were properly under perpetual tutelage. They will be the only generation of historians in history who will be able to interpret the old order to the new order with the advantage and authority derived from firsthand knowledge of the two ages and participation in both.

The historian sometimes forgets that he has professional problems in common with all storytellers. Of late he has tended to forget the most essential one of these—the problem of keeping his audience interested. So long as the story he had to tell contained no surprises, no unexpected turn of events, and lacked the elemental quality of suspense, the historian found his audience limited mainly to other historians, or captive students. While the newly dawned era adds new problems of its own to the historian's burden, it is lavish with its gifts of surprise and suspense for the use of the storyteller. If there are any readily recognizable characteristics of the new era, they are the fortuitous, the unpredictable, the adventitious, and the dynamic—all of them charged with surprise.

The new age bears another and more ominous gift for the historian, one that has not been conspicuous in historical writings since the works of the Christian fathers. This gift is the element of the catastrophic. The Church fathers, with their apocalyptic historiography, understood the dramatic advantage possessed by the storyteller who can keep his audience sitting on the edge of eternity. The modern secular historian, after submitting to a long cycle of

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C. VANN WOODWARD

historicism, has at last had this dramatic advantage restored. The restoration, to be sure, arrived under scientific rather than apocalyptic auspices. But the dramatic potentials were scarcely diminished by placing in human hands at one and the same time the Promethean fire as well as the divine prerogative of putting an end to the whole drama of human history.

Of one thing we may be sure. We come of an age that demands a great deal of historians. Of such a time Jacob Burckhardt once wrote, "The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled."¹⁹ He could hardly have phrased a more apt description of our own time. It is doubtful that any age has manifested a greater thirst for historical meaning and historical interpretation and therefore made greater demands upon the historian. What is required is an answer to the questions about the past and its relation to the present and future that the accelerated process of history raises. If historians evade such questions, people will turn elsewhere for the answers, and modern historians will qualify for the definition that Tolstoi once formulated for academic historians of his own day. He called them deaf men replying to questions that nobody puts to them. If on the other hand they do address themselves seriously to the historical questions for which the new age demands answers, the period might justly come to be known in historiography as the age of reinterpretation.

¹⁹ Jacob Burckhardt, *Force and Freedom* (New York, 1955), p. 238.

Pamphlets Published by the
SERVICE CENTER FOR TEACHERS
OF HISTORY

1. Key to the Past: Some History Books for Pre-College Readers, by MARGARETA FAISSLER

2. New Interpretations in American Foreign Policy, by ALEXANDER DECONDE

3. The South in American History, by OTIS A. SINGLETARY

4. Industrial Revolution: Interpretations and Perspectives, by ERIC E. LAMPARD

5. Civil War and Reconstruction, by HAL BRIDGES

6. The American Revolution: A Review of Changing Interpretations, by EDMUND S. MORGAN

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12. The Middle West, by HARRY R. STEVENS

13. History of Science, by MARIE BOAS

14. The Nature and Practice of State and Local History, by PHILIP D. JORDAN

15. Chinese History: A Bibliographic Review, by CHARLES O. HUCKER

16. New Interpretations of American Colonial History, by LOUIS B. WRIGHT

17. The History of India: Its Study and Interpretation, by ROBERT I. CRANE

18. The Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism, by WILLIAM J. BOUWSMA

19. Recent Trends and New Literature in Canadian History, by ROBIN W. WINKS

20. Nationalism: Interpreters and Interpretations, by BOYD C. SHAFER

21. The Background of the French Revolution, by STANLEY J. IDZERDA

22. A Style of History for Beginners, by PAUL L. WARD

23. The Middle Ages in Recent Historical Thought: Selected Topics, by BRYCE LYON

24. The Near and Middle East: An Introduction To History and Bibliography, by RODERIC H. DAVISON

25. The New Deal in Historical Perspective, by FRANK FREIDEL

26. The Far West in American History, by HARVEY L. CARTER

27. Five Images of Germany: Half a Century of American Views on German History, by HENRY CORD MEYER

28. Great Britain in the Twentieth Century, by HENRY R. WINKLER

29. Nineteenth-Century Europe—Crisis and Contribution, by EUGENE N. ANDERSON

30. American Intervention: 1917 and 1941, by ERNEST R. MAY

31. United States History: A Bridge to the World of Ideas, (A Syllabus) by W. BURLIE BROWN

32. Normalcy and Reaction, 1921-1933: An Age of Disillusionment, by JOHN D. HICKS

33. The European Peasantry from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century, by JEROME BLUM

34. Japanese History: New Dimensions of Approach and Understanding, by JOHN WHITNEY HALL

35. The Age of Reinterpretation, by C. VANN WOODWARD