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American Catholic Historiography: A Post-Conciliar Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

David J. O'Brien
David J. O'Brien
Affiliation:
Professor of History, Loyola College, Montreal, Canada
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Extract

Papers on historiography, reviewing and assessing recent literature in a particular field, have become commonplace and no one questions their value or utility. A report of this sort would be useful today on the subject of American Catholicism for, in the ten years since Henry J. Browne last surveyed the field, a number of high quality monographs have appeared. Nevertheless there is a second type of historiographical analysis more relevant today. Historiography can be seen as a category of intellectual history which relates historical works to the periods in which they were written and attempts to uncover their basic assumptions, revealing more immediately the limitations of the historical discipline, suggesting new questions to be asked, new avenues to be explored, new techniques, new metaphors, new models to be utilized. Bernard Weisberger's well known article, “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography,” for example, pointed out the influence of changing social conditions and intellectual fashions on historical views of the reconstruction period and suggested new questions and modes of interpretation arising quite self-consciously out of the needs and anxieties of the present.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 80 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1968

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References

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