Includes bibliographical references.

Explicit data and implicit assumptions in historical study.--The tasks of research in American history.--History and the social sciences.--Historians and the problem of large-scale community formation.--The historians use of nationalism and vice versa.--Abundance and the Turner thesis.--C. Vann Woodward and the uses of history.--Conflict, consensus, and comity: a review of Richard Hofstadter's The progressive historians.--Roy F. Nichols and the rehabilitation of American political history.--Is America a civilization?--The quest for the national character.--American individualism in the twentieth century.--American women and the American character.--The roots of American alienation.--Rejection of the prevailing American society.--Social cohesion and the crisis of law.