Resumen de A new departure
For academic history has largely done its work in the name of democracy. History, it claims, must embody the experience and feelings of ordinary people, especially those who have been oppressed, exploited, and barred from the corridors of power. It claims further that a focus on peoples and their victimization should replace nations and their traditions, and that attention to wars, rulers, and political contests should give way to sexualities and personal identities. Since diplomatic, intellectual, political, and economic history, among other subjects, prove resistant to race, class, and gender, they are barely tolerated when not treated with open contempt. The demand that historians privilege race, class, and gender is occurring in an atmosphere that uncomfortably resembles the McCarthyism of the 1950s. It is being imposed by presiding cliques that have made ideological conformity the primary criterion for holding office.
