The aristocracy of the past was Federalist, the democracy of the future Republican. For reasons that are not entirely clear, he thinks it makes sense for contemporary Americans to take sides in the fierce partisan struggles of this era–and leaves no doubt about which side we should take. Instead of showering his empathy indiscriminately, Wood casts his story of egalitarian blossoming in relentlessly partisan terms. In an opus of book reviews, many published originally in The New York Review of Books and The New Republic and collected in The Purpose of the Past (2008), Wood has been very explicit about the proper role for a historian of the early United States: to empathize with the good intentions and well-meaning gestures of the Founders with a capital F.īut not all the Founders. Even so, Wood thinks the history of the United States in the era from the adoption of the Constitution to the conclusion of the War of 1812 should be mobilized to instill pride rather than provoke sorrow, to highlight triumphs instead of tragedies. He acknowledges that a dynasty of Virginia slaveholders dominated the government, that the Louisiana Purchase and cotton gin ignited an explosive westward expansion of slavery and that an Indian policy of massacre and expulsion destroyed any hope for a less violent future in the West. Wood, a professor emeritus at Brown University, seems to realize that the happy story he tells about the rise of equality-loving go-getters–a process he calls the “republicanization” of American society–had a dark side.
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