For many years, historians thought that the development of capitalism had not faced serious challenges in the United States. Writing in the early twentieth century, Progressive historians sympathized with the battles waged by farmers and small producers against large capitalists in the late nineteenth century, but they did not question the widespread acceptance of laissez-faire (unregulated) capitalism throughout American history. Similarly, Louis Hartz, who sometimes disagreed with the Progressives, argued that Americans accepted laissez-faire capitalism without challenge because they lacked a feudal, precapitalist past. Recently, however, some scholars have argued that even though laissez-faire became the prevailing ethos in nineteen-century America, it was not accepted without struggle. Laissez-faire capitalism, they suggest, clashed with existing religious and communitarian norms that imposed moral constraints on acquisitiveness to protect the weak from the predatory, the strong from corruption, and the entire culture from materialist excess. Buttressed by mercantilist notions that government should be both regulator and promoter of economic activity, these norms persisted long after the American Revolution helped unleash the economic forces that produced capitalism. These scholars argue that even in the late nineteenth century, with the government's role in the economy considerably diminished, laissez-faire had not triumphed completely. Hard times continued to revive popular demands for regulating business and softening the harsh edges of aissez-faire capitalism.

    Historians who study European women of the Renaissance try to measure "independence," "options," and other indicators of the degree to which the expression of women's individuality was either permitted or suppressed.Influenced by Western individualism, these historians define a peculiar form of personhood: an innately bounded unit, autonomous and standing apart from both nature and society. An anthropologist, however, would contend that a person can be conceived in ways other than as an "individual." In many societies a person's identity is not intrinsically unique and self-contained but instead is defined within a complex web of social relationships.

    In her study of the fifteenth-century Florentine widow Alessandra Strozzi, a historian who specializes in European women of the Renaissance attributes individual intention and authorship of actions to her subject. This historian assumes that Alessandra had goals and interests different from those of her sons, yet much of the historian's own research reveals that Alessandra acted primarily as a champion of her sons' interests, taking their goals as her own. Thus Alessandra conforms more closely to the anthropologist's notion that personal motivation is embedded in a social context. Indeed, one could argue that Alessandra did not distinguish her personhood from that of her sons. In Renaissance Europe the boundaries of the con-ceptual self were not always firm and closed and did not necessarily coincide with the boundaries of the bodily self.