ENGAGEMENT WITH THE PAST: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians.

By William Palmer. Univ. Press of Kentucky. 372 pp. $32

Soviet historians used to joke that they were the bravest academics of them all. Any fool could predict the glorious Soviet future; only the boldest would dare deal with something so dangerously unpredictable as the past. But then all historians do this, reinterpreting and even reinventing the past in the light of concerns and biases of their own day. In Britain and America over the past 50 years, there were few risks and many rewards for striking out boldly in a fast-expanding field.

Palmer, a professor of history at Marshall University in West Virginia, has written a most engaging book about the generation of British and American historians who challenged the orthodoxies sustaining some of the most cherished national myths. Christopher

Hill portrayed the English Civil War as a class struggle. The German-born Geoffrey Elton (a Jewish refugee who spent his career trying to comprehend the enigma of the hospitable English) asserted that what we thought was the birth of the English nation under the Tudors in the 16th century was in fact mere bureaucratic reorganization. J. H. Plumb found the Whig Revolution and Ascendancy equally the work (and profit) of Tories. A. J. P. Taylor deflated the heroic legend of 1940 by pointing out that "all that was best and most enlightened in English life" had been only too willing to appease Hitler.

In America, the Arkansas-born C. Vann Woodward, who recalled as a boy watching a lynch mob form and seeing the Ku Klux Klan march into church in full regalia, revealed a South rather less segregated, far more divided, and much more complex than the conventional view had it. William McNeill, a Canadian Presbyterian transplanted to a riotous 1920s Chicago, leapfrogged the Great Man school of history to give pride of place to microbes and plagues rather than human weapons. The brilliant young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who challenged the deeply held American myth of the classless society by identifying the class politics in the Age of Jackson, went on to revive the Great Man delusion with a moving if near-hagiographic account of John F. Kennedy’s Thousand Days.

Palmer is on to something when he suggests that the World War II historians had much in common beyond the way they pottered back and forth across the Atlantic to form an almost single culture. The American historians were grappling with the origins of a great power that had suddenly reached its prime, while the British were dealing with the causes of their decline as well as with the causes of their earlier ascendance to global power. And both were living in societies gripped by the Cold War, which made Marxist analysis, whether of the English Civil War or the American one, acutely political.

The author clearly relishes the grand tussles, such as the debate between Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper over the decline—or rise—of the English gentry in the century before the Civil War, or between Trevor-Roper and A. J. P. Taylor over the roots of World War II. Indeed, the book would be far less enjoyable without Trevor-Roper, an intellectual bully with a killer instinct. No wonder half of Oxford cheered when Taylor rebutted his attacks in a celebrated Encounter article called "How to Quote—Exercises for Beginners," which showed Trevor-Roper misquoting or unfairly summarizing what Taylor had written. Taylor concluded: "The Regius Professor’s methods might do harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one."

—Martin Walker