I would disagree with that statement. I studied American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. That discipline was actually created at Penn, with a big assist by Dr. Anthony Garvan. One of the focuses was Puritan New England, another the ante-bellum South. The curriculum consisted largely of primary sources—the letters, diaries and sermons of the people who were alive at the time. The whole idea was to grasp the authors’ experiences of their own society, and not an interpretation by some subsequent historian. In Dr. Garvan’s view, studying the primary sources (and material culture such as clothes, tools and table ware) was the best way to sidestep the biases and misplaced conclusions of subsequent generations. His goal was to get us to think like Puritans for a while so we could better appreciate how their world view (such as the doctrine of predestination) differed from our own.