The Challenge of Modern Historiography

GORDON WRIGHT, speaking from this rostrum a few years ago, warned that those who have the honor of perpetuating the Association's ritual of presidential addresses "might do well not to take their pronouncements as the voice of God or the crystallized wisdom of the ages," and he wondered if it were not significant that the president is allowed only one parting shot to speak ex cathedra, "not at the outset of his term of office but at the very end, only forty-eight hours before he 'passes into history,' as the saying goes. By that time it is much too late for him to make promises, to influence the Association's future course, or even to be held to answer for his stewardship or for such sophistries as his swan song may contain." Having thus taken the curse off any ex cathedra pronouncements that might follow, Professor Wright proceeded to pronounce on one of the most elevated, difficult, and controversial issues that faces historians who think about what they do-namely, the degree to which history is a moral science.1 I admire his courage, but I take my lead from his warning. What follows is nothing more than a general consideration of certain problems of modern historiography encountered by a working historian-a historian, as it happens, just emerging from a considerable period of research and planning for a large-scale project. This project is an effort to describe as a single story the recruitment, settlement patterns, and developing character of the American population in the preindustrial era. It covers a long period of timethe two hundred years from the early seventeenth century to the advent of industrialism. Further, it involves population movements over a vast geographical area-an area stretching from the bleak island of Foula off the west coast of the Shetlands at the latitude of Greenland to the Lunda Kingdom deep in equatorial Africa, from the Baltic port of Flensburg and from Gorlitz on the German-Polish border to Natchez and Pensacola. And, finally, the problems it involves lead naturally beyond history itself to other disciplines as they relate to history: