In preparing these lectures, White referenced liberally from newspapers, pamphlets, and manuscripts, which he acquired. In his interpretation, White consciously sought to speak to an American audience, which he expected to be concerned primarily with democratic and constitutional principles and the inherent risks to them from both landowning, privileged elites and from popular egalitarianism. He rejected Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, as a “prose poem,” too inclined to overlook constitutional and legal principles, and dismissed the essays and commentaries on royalty, nobility, and military affairs published by the Irish conservative J. W. Croker as “Tory…sham history.” Nor does White draw on Tocqueville, whom he probably read only much later and characterized as “a cloud of doubt and disappointment.”[11] White favorably referenced the work of Francois-Auguste Mignet, a July Monarchy liberal and associate of Guizot, though his primary inspiration certainly had been Laboulaye.[12]
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White never realized his ambition to publish these lectures as a book, but this work framed a distinctly American approach to French Revolutionary historiography. His lectures should be considered “canonical” for several reasons. First, they proposed an historiography of the French Revolution in the United States that would be at the center of scholastic and academic, or as White would have considered it, scientific history. Secondly, he conceived and delivered them as based upon primary source material open to interpretation; that is to say, he did not draw upon a broader body of interpretation or even a textbook in his undergraduate courses. A third historiographically significant attribute of White’s’ lectures was the focus he brought to “the causes of the Revolution” and in particular, the intellectual origins of its ideals, and was explicit in presenting the French Revolution as part of an Atlantic republican political tradition. As he put it in his 1865 lecture to the Long Island Historical Society, “facts” are merely the “husks and the rinds,” but “ideas are the kernel” of history, and the French Revolution he presented was a moment in which a “great flood of new thought … swept away ideas, institutions and men with such fury that it seemed about to surge over the whole world.” He emphasized that through such an approach, “local history and national history connect necessarily with world history.”[13]