Economic History in the United States: Formative Years of a Discipline

The American people have usually been regarded as forward-looking and progressive, willing frequently to move their activities from one place to another to attain their hopes and inclined to be impatient with the heritage of the past. But there seems to have been, almost from the beginning, a minority of people in this country who found pleasure in looking back over the road that they and their forebears had traveled and in encouraging a scholarly chronicling of such progress. Perhaps the fact that so many early immigrants came from western Europe, with its much longer high-ways of economic and cultural advance, had something to do with this. But there was also the circumstance that the early settlers in America, as well as many later migrants to our West, were a Bible-reading people. The Bible is, after all, a record of movements among peoples through the centuries, and the duty placed on members of Protestant churches to become thoroughly familiar with their source of divine guidance could well have implanted a bias toward, or a fondness for, historical ideas and writings. And the citizens of a new country, it may be suggested, could hardly fail to be conscious of change through time as a true fact of life.