The overall interpretation of American history has fallen upon hard times. Once upon a time, so the story of American historywriting goes, there existed a complete model of the United States' past that explained as it described the dynamics of American history over the centuries. Not only did the progressive or conflict school of historians assent to a paradigm of moral and methodological assumptions, but its practitioners also possessed a model of American society that was applicable to the whole of the United States' past as well as to its parts. The succeeding counterprogressive or consensus historians, by transmuting the realities of their predecessors into the realm of myth and paradox, questioned their easy correlation of class position and ideation, but they failed to develop an explicit model of the workings of American society that would describe let alone explain the dynamics of its history. New Left historians challenged the static nature as well as the moral judgments of consensus history by stressing, once again, the relationship of power and interests to cultural hegemony and the possibilities of social action from the masses, but the dynamics of conflict they reintroduced into American history too often failed to meet the new standards of rigorous explanation considered so important by the practitioners of the so-called new histories. The new economic, political, and social historians' insistence upon explicit methodology and the statistical analysis of correlation and variability destroys old models more than it advances new ones to explain parts of American history, let alone all of it. Thus, at this point in the history of American historiography, we have lost any overall approach to the framework of American history as we have gained sharper tools to achieve its testing and verification.