In 1959, John Higham developed the concept of an emerging consensus among historians that he saw as based on the search for "a placid, unexciting past" as part of "a massive grading operation to smooth over America's social convulsions."
Higham felt the conservative frame of reference was creating a "paralyzing incapacity to deal with the elements of spontaneity, effervescence, and violence in American history".
Novick includes as other prominent leaders David M. Potter, Perry Miller, Clinton Rossiter, Henry Steele Commager, Allan Nevins and Edmund Morgan.
[2] Consensus history rejected the concept of the central role of class conflict and all kinds of other social divisions that were prevalent in the older "Progressive" historiography, as articulated especially by Charles A.
Instead of persistent conflict (whether between agrarians and industrialists, capital and labor, or Democrats and Republicans), American history was characterized by broad agreement on fundamentals, particularly the virtues of individual liberty, private property, and capitalist enterprise.
[10] He thought that in almost all previous periods of the history of the United States, except the Civil War, there was an implicit fundamental consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington had "put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed.
He says that Hofstadter, Hartz and Boorstin believed that "the prosperity and apparent class harmony" after 1945 reflected "a return to the true Americanism rooted in liberal capitalism."