What drove people to do what they did in the past?
Chapter 3 is good preparation for the evaluation in Chapter 4 of one historian’s argument about the decision to annex the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. In this chapter you can begin to use primary sources to reach a conclusion about a historian’s argument. In as much as historians still disagree about the American decision to establish an overseas empire, the essay and the primary sources in this chapter provide another opportunity to see how subjective historical interpretation can be.
One of the most important sources of disagreement among historians is the question of motivation. What drove people to do what they did in the past? The good historian, like the detective in a murder mystery, eventually asks that question. Chapter 5 illustrates the importance of motivation by examining what was behind the promotion of a new housing style in the early twentieth century known as the bungalow. That topic also demonstrates that historians often look in some unlikely places to understand the past.
Motives in history are, of course, related to ideas, the subject of Chapter 6. What power do ideas exert in history? What is their relationship, for example, to the motives examined in the previous chapter? In Chapter 6 we try to answer these questions by examining the role of ideology in advertising during the 1920s.
Chapter 7 turns from the influence of ideas in the past to the influence of a single individual. In this chapter we examine the activities of Eleanor Roosevelt as First Lady. Few First Ladies were more admired, or hated. What can histori- ans learn about an era by focusing on one prominent individual like Eleanor Roosevelt? In the past, many historians believed that history was nothing more than the biography of great people. How much can students of history learn about the past by looking at it this way, that is, “from the top down”? How much do they miss by doing so? Such questions are, of course, related to the topics of previous chapters: historical evidence, motivation, and the influence of ideas.
The next chapter examines history from the opposite perspective—“from the bottom up.” What can historians learn by looking at the people at the bottom of a society? What challenges face historians who try? During World War II, a good place for looking at history this way is in the slums of Detroit and barrios of Los Angeles, two of America’s greatest war-production centers. Chapter 8 examines the race riots that occurred there in 1943. We will see who the rioters were and why their lives are important to historians.
Having considered the questions of motivation and ideas in history and examined the past from different perspectives, in Chapter 9 we look at the impact of anticommunist hysteria on postwar popular culture. Aside from the question of causation, this chapter considers the problems historians face when they try to trace the influence of one large force in history. As we shall
4 Introduction
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