Benson J. Lossing\u27s interest in reaching a popular rather than an elite audience, his journalistic style, and the changing methods of historical research, which began to develop at the end of the nineteenth century, have all led to the current opinion of him-that he was a popularizer of history, and not a historian. However, an examination of his long and varied career suggests that his work deserves consideration in the study of antebellum American life
