Generalizations and History

The strength of historians' generalizations depends on the depth of examples from which they generalize. A number of works of American history demonstrate this point. Beard noted in his landmark work on the economic bases of the United States Constitution that "as in natural science no organism is pretended to be understood as long as merely its superficial aspects are described, so in history no movement by a mass of people can be correctly comprehended until that mass is resolved into its component parts" (253). But, as Beard himself wished to point out, there are distinct limits on how many of the individuals that make up such a movement can be known and how much detail will be available -- or even useful -- on each individual. Beard's famous study demonstrated how the prevailing view of the nature of an event could be radically altered by specific attention to the interests of the parties involved -- as revealed in the study of primary sources -- rather than merely accepting the historical actors' self-proclaimed evaluation of the event. The meaningful interpretation of historical events depends on mastery of the primary sources. Historiography that proceeds from preconceived notions without explicit attention to original sources tends, instead, to reflect the ideology of the original actors, of patriotic legend, or of previous historians, thereby obscuring rather than clarifying the meaning of events.

Later historians continued this attention to primary sources a

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individual and class interests playing the principal role--as must nearly always be the case. In his 1952 article, "Democracy in Colonial Massachusetts," Brown addressed the prevailing assumption that colonial society in America was undemocratic. Historians widely assumed that property qualifications prohibited large numbers of men from voting. It was, he noted, on the basis of this assumption that the Revolution was interpreted as "an internal class conflict as well as a movement for independence from Great Britain" (291). In his essay, however, Brown questioned the assumption by examining a variety of primary sources relevant to province voting in Massachusetts. Suffrage was, of course, based on property qualifications. But, as Brown discovered from his review of documents related to disputed elections, censuses, tax lists, and private accounts, the property qualification did not, in fact, exclude a very large number of men from voting in the larger towns of the colony. The number of qualified voters ranged from 53.5 percent in Marblehead (with 785 adult males) to 97.2 percent in Worcester (with 329 males). Even in the largest population centers such as Boston (1998 adult males) and Salem (895 adult males) the percenta

Category: History - G