The history profession in America has changed dramatically in the past half century. The GI Bill after the Second World War brought about rapid growth in American higher education, including history programs. In the 1950s, the dominant interpretation of American history was the consensus school, which emphasized the homogeneity and lack of conflict in American culture and history at least partly in reaction to the previous Progressive historians, who portrayed class, political and regional conflict as the motivating force in American history. Daniel Boorstin, Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter were among the best-known and most influential historians working in the consensus tradition.

The 1960s saw the beginnings of a profound historiographical upheaval that is still underway today This revolutionary “paradigm shift” had several components. Perhaps the most visible and controversial development was the emergence of a New Left school of history Influenced by a growing sense of the problems and inequalities of American society particularly in reaction to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, New Left historians criticized the consensus school for an overly complacent and congratulatory view of America’s past, and instead emphasized the elements of exploitation, imperialism and racism in America’s past. New Left history produced revisionist accounts of the Cold War, slavery and abolitionism, emphasized the pervasiveness of radical events and individuals in America’s past, and often tried to write “history from the bottom up,” focusing on lower-class or previously “inarticulate” elements of society. William Appleman Williams and Eugene Genovese were among the most influential New Left historians.

Related to New Left history was a profound and long-lasting development, the emergence of a “new social history” The most important accomplishment of social historians was to expand the focus of the discipline beyond an emphasis on white, middle-/upper-class males to a more inclusive perspective. The growth of women’s and African American history was just the tip of the iceberg. Social historians examined an almost endless array of previously ignored subgroups of American society including Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, European ethnic groups, workers, the poor, the elderly children, adolescents, gays and bisexuals, and so on.

Following the example of the influential French Annales school of historiography American historians also focused more attention on private behavior and everyday life, producing studies of topics from marriage and family life to the climate and environment, and nearly everything in between.

American historians have been caught up in “culture-wars” controversies between the left and right in recent years, including a bitter conflict over a planned 1995 Hiroshima memorial exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. Historians have pondered the significance of postmodern theory for their discipline, and worried about growing specialization and loss of coherence. A chronically depressed and depressing job market has marred an otherwise unprecedentedly vibrant, challenging, innovative era in American historiography.