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

从美国建国初期到世纪，美国历史著作的特点首先是希望从一个角度把握广泛的事物。此外，历史学家在这一时期开始收集、保存和传播历史文献，这些个人资料被纳入作为其历史概括的证据，尽管总是带有一些关于其典型性和独特性的模糊性。对个人的兴趣也与对普遍可变性的新认识有很大关系。为了描述历史的变迁，历史学家转向地质学及其分层的时间性形象。

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 Moreover, historians started to collect, preserve, and diffuse historical documents during this period, and those individual data were incorporated as evidences for their historical generalizations, though always tinged with some ambiguities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.