SOURCE: Wilentz, Sean. “The New History and Its Critics.” Dissent 36, no. 2 (spring 1989): 242-49.

In the following review, Wilentz asserts that Himmelfarb's arguments in The New History and the Old are representative of neoconservative trends in historical scholarship. Wilentz goes on to provide a historical overview of the development of the new social history which Himmelfarb criticizes in her essays.

Gertrude Himmelfarb's engaging, censorious collection of essays [The New History and the Old] brings to mind how little the neoconservatives have affected American historical writing. Surely no one could have predicted this failure, given both the resources at the neocons' command and history's notorious exposure to shifting political winds. Recent conservatizing trends have certainly touched historical scholarship in other Western democracies. Yet in the United States, it has fallen to economists, philosophers, and political scientists to fashion an academically plausible neoconservativism. Among popular and academic historians alike, liberals, radicals...