This blog post examines the contrasting interpretations of the American Revolution offered by innovationism, consensus historiography, and New Left historiography, exploring how conflict and consensus operated simultaneously.
As the United States moved beyond an agrarian society and underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late 19th century, various conflicts erupted alongside the structural changes sweeping society. Amidst this context, the so-called Innovationist historiography led by Turner emerged, characterized by its identification of conflict as the core driving force of history. For instance, Turner defined the frontier—a space where barbarism and civilization coexisted—as the source of American development, emphasizing the conflict between the industrialized North and the agriculturally dominant South. Another progressive historian, Becker, proposed a dual revolution theory. He revealed that the American Revolution was not only a struggle between the American colonies and the mother country over taxation issues, but also a power struggle between conservative, feudal colonial elites—such as upper-class merchants and landowners—and lower-class artisans and laborers. Furthermore, Innovationist historiography understood the Constitution as the outcome of a battle won by a group of movable property owners—composed of financiers and merchants—against a group of real estate owners of peasant origin who were burdened by debt, viewing it as an undemocratic document. This Innovationist historiography dominated American historical scholarship until the 1940s.
However, after World War II, conservative public opinion in the United States, having witnessed Nazi Germany’s suppression of human rights and the expansion of communism, began to reassess the American values that Innovationist historiography had criticized: the sanctity of private property, individualism, and economic liberalism. The recognition that national unity was essential to preserving American identity within the Cold War order also fueled this shift. It was within this era’s atmosphere that the Consensus School emerged, seeking to understand American history through the lens of consensus and continuity. In contrast to the progressive historians who interpreted the American Revolution as a dramatic struggle between conservative heirs and the lower classes, Hofstadter, representing the consensus school, argued that Americans, united by American values as a common ideology, maintained social homogeneity and minimized conflict. Ultimately, the consensus school emphasized that American history fundamentally demonstrated continuity, not a sudden rupture or interruption caused by the Revolution. In this context, the American Revolution was assessed as a rather limited event. Harts, too, concurred with Tocqueville’s observation that America lacked a feudal past. He explained that those who fled the feudal oppression of the Old World were already born free, and thus had no need to spark a revolution to create a free world. While reformist historians like Beard viewed the Constitution’s adoption as a product of class conflict, the Consensus School placed greater emphasis on the fact that the Constitution was achieved through the consensus of the middle class. The focus was on the process of consensus-building among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, rather than their individual economic interests. Furthermore, Boorstin supplemented this interpretation by tracing the American spirit of generosity and compromise to the frontier experience. Thus, consensus historiography, which maintained a critical stance toward reformist thought while emphasizing America’s liberal tradition and national consensus, dominated American historical scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s.
However, from the mid-1960s onward, American society entered a period of severe ideological upheaval, epitomized by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. This reality raised questions about the bright image of America’s past and present presented by consensus historiography. Consequently, a new trend emerged that, unlike consensus historiography but similar to progressive historiography, focused on conflict and poverty. This is called New Left historiography. Among the historians leading this movement was the diplomatic historian Williams. Where consensus historiography viewed policymakers as distancing themselves from imperialist expansion policies after the late 19th century and defined the 1898 Spanish-American War as a “great aberration,” Williams criticized that politicians consistently pursued overseas expansion policies under the guise of “opening the door” to capital, either to obscure domestic divisions or to serve capital’s interests. New Left historians like Howard Zinn aligned with progressive historiography while maintaining that history must also respond to ideological demands. However, unlike progressive historiography, New Left history did not reduce history to material conditions or class conflict alone. In studies of the American Revolution and the Constitution, many New Left historians focused not only on the conflict between the propertied and propertyless classes but also on the history of the people and power relations. Emerging against the backdrop of diverse social movements—the Black civil rights movement, Native American movements, women’s movements, and the poor people’s movement—New Left historiography paid particular attention to restoring the active roles these subjugated groups played during the Revolutionary War and the constitutional drafting process. This restoration work revealed the roles of multi-layered actors overlooked by the dominant narratives in the unfolding of American history, becoming a crucial catalyst for understanding American history as a more complex and multifaceted process.
