Introduction

Written history is always very much a reflection of its author's perspective. That perspective is shaped by the intellectual and social environment, as well as by the events that dominated the author's lifetime. Historians are as much reflectors of their times as they are reporters. It is well for readers of historical works to be aware of the perspectives, biases, and unconscious attitudes that underlie particular interpretations of the past. Obviously, a Tory will write a version of the American Revolution different from that of a pro-American. A man whose intellectually formative years came amid the economic class strife of the post-Civil-War era will identify moving forces in history different from those selected by a man who grew up during World War II, the Cold War, and the domestic consensus of the 1950s. Thus interpretations of American--and Connecticut--history usually reflect the era in which they were produced or in which the author formed his intellectual and social perspectives.

Historians have identified two principal interpretive approaches to American history: consensus and conflict. There are many variations on these, with scholars giving greater or lesser emphasis to economic forces or intellectual currents, great leadership or mass movements, technological developments or moral commitment, and any number of other historical tendencies. But the principal dichotomy is between those who see the course of American history as movement along a broad social frontier cohering around a nearly universal consensus on a wide spectrum of ideas, attitudes, values, and aspirations: and those who see the nation's history as shaped by a series of conflicts that pitted the west against the east, farmers against industrialists, north against south, blacks against whites, liberals against conservatives, labor against capitalism, and so on and on.

Again speaking very generally, the early chroniclers of the colonial period wrote from a particular perspective--usually with an intent to persuade--that put them on one or the other side of a controversy of long-or short-term concern. Thus we have Puritans, Anglicans, Patriots, Tories, New Englanders, New Yorkers, Congregationalists, Baptists, and many others reporting on American and Connecticut events. In the nineteenth century, historical writing tended toward a flamboyant chauvinism informed by a strong white, Protestant, Eastern, upperclass consensus. This nationalist consensual approach is usually referred to as the "Whig" interpretation, or sometimes the "Bancroftian," after its most popular nineteenth-century proponent, George Bancroft.

The late nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, which saw a Progressive response to the wrench of rapid industrial and urban domination of a previously agrarian and rural society, brought forward conflict interpretations. These historical views were coincident with the development of professional historical method and a community of trained scholars, so that the era ending with World War II was nominated by professional historians of Progressive bent. The view that emphasizes economic and geographic conflict is customarily referred to as "Progressive historiography."

General works on Connecticut history frequently reflect these approaches--the Whig, and the Progressive historiography. Works by professional scholars occasionally contain historiographic discussions of their particular area of concern in introductions or bibliographic essays, and there are two or three discussions of Connecticut historiography in print. Christopher Collier, "Steady Habits Considered and Reconsidered," in Connecticut Review 5(April, 1972), describes the major scholarly works in the field in the context of the question: was Connecticut a land of steady habits, or was it one of conflict? In Nineteenth-Century Historians of New Haven (Hamden: Archon, 1972), Richard Hegel writes about American historiography generally in Chapter I, and briefly about Connecticut historiography before the twentieth century in his summary and epilogue. Hegel's work supercedes Henry H. Towsend, "John W. Barber, Illustrator and Historian," in Papers of the NHCHS 10(1951):313-36. A shorter piece that covers more historians and is conceptually rather than biographically focused is Daniel Horowitz, "The Meaning of City Biographies: New Haven in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," in CHS Bulletin 29(July, 1964) 3:65-75. Horowitz includes a chronological list of forty-one historians of New Haven, from Barber to Dahl.

In a major effort at historiographic summary, Bruce Fraser brought together five specialists in different eras of Connecticut history at a program sponsored by the Association for the Study of Connecticut History and funded by the Connecticut Humanities Council in the winter of 1981. The papers presented were to survey works dealing with Connecticut history published since 1970, but some authors chose to look at the field over a longer period. These essays provide serious beginners with a shortcut to the literature; they should be consulted as much for the authors' historiographic insights as for the titles listed, few of which, if any, are omitted from the work you hold in your hand. The papers were published in Connecticut History 23(April, 1982):

Daniels, Bruce C. "Antiquarians and Professionals: The Historians of Colonial Connecticut."

Main, Jackson Turner. "Recent Writings on Connecticut History, 1760-1800: An Evaluation."

Lipson, Dorothy Ann. "The Historian and Nineteenth-Century Connecticut, 1800-1865."

Feinstein, Estelle F. "Bibliographic Essay on Recent Materials on Connecticut in the Gilded Age."

Janick, Herbert F., Jr. "The New Social History in Twentieth-Century Connecticut."

Books on historical subjects vary widely in their reliability in both fact and interpretation. Professional historians are trained to discriminate among the materials presented so as to sort out the trustworthy and judicious from the inaccurate and unsophisticated. The major problem lies in the fact that too often historians write for other historians, without regard to public needs and tastes. Thus amateurs, antiquarians, and journalists fill the demand for popular histories, and the very works that require the greatest discrimination are read by those least able to discriminate.

The kindest approach to the popular histories--unsophisticated, unreliable, and, unhappily, widely read--is that taken by Albert C. Bates in his introduction to Marguerite Allis' Connecticut Trilogy. "Actual records," he writes "are all that are supposed to be of interest to the true historian. The Antiquarian, on the other hand, enjoys not only the records, but the stories which so frequently accompany them, stories which, if examined carefully, are perhaps less finely discriminating than the records themselves. They do, however, possess a background of historical information, although they are less concerned with the letter than with the spirit of the incidents to which they relate. Such legends and traditions add much to the glamour of the past and reanimate it for those who come long after the historical occurrences."

Listed below are all the book-length general histories of Connecticut published before 1982. Annotations reflect the historiographic discussion above, but it must be understood that they include some individual judgments with which other scholars might not always agree. For other opinions, readers will find reviews of many works on Connecticut history in the pages of the CHS Bulletin and, since 1967, in Connecticut History (formerly The Connecticut History Newsletter). Of course, the major scholarly historical journals also review serious works of Connecticut history.

But before you start, perhaps you want to know if you are reading about the Nutmeg State, the Constitution State, the Provisions State, or the Land of Steady Habits. If so, see Bruce C. Daniels’ piece in the CHS Bulletin 43(July, 1978)3:91-96.