Consensus history

Consensus history is a style of American historiography that emphasizes the basic unity of American values and downplays conflict as superficial and lacking in complexity. The movement was especially influential in the 1950s and 1960s. Prominent leaders included Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, Daniel J. Boorstin and David M. Potter. Other prominent exemplars included Perry Miller, Clinton Rossiter, Henry Steele Commager, Allan Nevins and Edmund Morgan. It rejected the "Progressive" historiography that had previously dominated, and which stressed the central importance of class conflict in American history. Charles A. Beard was the most prominent representative of the discredited progressive or "Beardian" approach.

Consensus history was rejected by New Left viewpoints that attracted younger more radical historians in the 1960s. These viewpoints stress conflict and emphasize the central roles of class, race and gender.

In 1959 John Higham identified an emerging consensus among historians that was based on the search for "a placid, unexciting past" as part of "a massive grading operation to smooth over America's social convulsions." Higham called it the "Cult of the American Consensus."

After 1945, Hofstadter philosophically broke with Charles A. Beard and moved to the right in his leadership of the "consensus historians". Hofstadter disliked the term, but it was widely applied to his rejection of the Beardian idea that there was a fundamental conflict running throughout American history that pitted economic classes against each other. As early as his American Political Tradition (1948) Hofstadter had rejected black-and-white polarization between pro- and anti-business politicians. Hofstadter made a compelling statement of the consensus model of the American political tradition:

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