Natural History Turned National History: A Study of Late-18thto Mid-19th-Century American Historiography

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What informed American historical writings from the early national era through the nineteenth century was, first of all, a panoramic desire to grasp a wide range of things at one view. Moreover, historians started to collect, preserve, and diffuse historical documents during this period, and those individual data were incorporated as evidences for their historical generalizations, though always tinged with some ambiguities concerning their nature of typicalness and uniqueness. The interest in the individual had much to do with a new awareness of universal mutability, too. To describe historical changes, historians then turned to geology and its image of layered temporality.