Editing J. H. Hexter (section)

==Scholarship and historiography==
Hexter coined the term [[tunnel history]].<ref name=Breen1972>{{cite journal |last1=Breen |first1=T. H. |title=English Origins and New World Development: The Case of the Covenanted Militia in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts |journal=Past & Present |date=1972 |issue=57 |pages=74–96 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/650417 |issn=0031-2746|url-access=subscription}}</ref><ref>Ostrowski, Donald (ed.), [https://academic.oup.com/cornell-scholarship-online/book/40415/chapter-abstract/347401072?redirectedFrom=fulltext 'Introduction'], Who Wrote That? Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov (Ithaca, NY, 2020; online edn, Cornell Scholarship Online, 21 Jan. 2021), https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749704.003.0001, accessed 24 Nov. 2024.</ref>

Hexter's scholarly reputation probably owes as much to his historiographical critiques as to his body of research.  He is noted for his distinction between [[lumpers and splitters|"splitters" and "lumpers"]] of historical material, and his 1975 attack on [[Christopher Hill (historian)|Christopher Hill]] (as a "lumper" of selectively read sources).<ref name="Palmer1979">{{cite journal |last1=Palmer |first1=William G. |title=The Burden of Proof: J.H. Hexter and Christopher Hill |journal=Journal of British Studies |date=1979 |volume=19 |issue=1 |pages=122–129 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/175685 |issn=0021-9371|url-access=subscription}}</ref> More to Hexter's fancy was the "splitter" who saw his responsibility to the full range of particulars and the ambiguity of historical sources.  "Lumping" was the tendency that, according to Hexter, threatened to bind historians to overreaching generalizations, of which he suggested [[Marxism]] was the most typical and intellectually pernicious.  Nonetheless, his essay appeared to argue that both tendencies (analysis and synthesis) were intellectually necessary.