HISTORICAL RELATIVISM: Beard

Abstract

[Versatile, prolific, and creatively unconventional, Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) had a great influence on the American historiography of this century. In his early years a student of European history—his first book The Industrial Revolution appeared in England in 1901—he maintained his interest in European thought after he shifted to American history. There he became a pioneer in the analysis of the economic roots of political behavior—and his works An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915) created a great, and on the whole salutary, stir among historians and laymen alike. Deeply concerned with the problems of the present, and devotedly democratic, Beard saw in history a means of democratic education, and his massive, highly successful survey, The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols. 1927, written with Mary R. Beard) opens with the characteristic sentence: “The history of a civilization, if intelligently conceived, may be an instrument of civilization.” Many of his forty-seven books enjoyed great popularity and it has been estimated that eleven million copies of them have been sold in various countries.