SOURCE: Scott, Joan W. Review of The New History and the Old, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989): 699-700.

In the following review of The New History and the Old, Scott asserts that Himmelfarb's arguments lack depth and that she oversimplifies ongoing debates within the field of history.

In these essays [in The New History and the Old,] published as individual pieces between 1974 and 1986, Gertrude Himmelfarb reasserts familiar conservative arguments in support of “traditional” history. That history, she says, takes politics as its subject, narrating the progress of “man's” reason as expressed in his creation of the laws, constitutions, governments, and nations, which through “the rational ordering and organization of society” (p. 21) “promote the public weal and the good life” (p. 18). Traditional history, in her account of it, accommodates change without disruption precisely because change is made part of a continuous story. It is, moreover, a...