History’s Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the History Enterprise in the United States, 1880-1940, by Robert B. Townsend

Abstract

History's Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the History Enterprise in the United States, 1880-1940, by Robert B. Townsend. Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2013. xiii, 258 pp. $30.00 US (paper). Robert Townsend tells a complex and valuable story that should interest all historians and also those general readers who have a passion for history and curiosity about how historians work. He looks at the development of the history enterprise over the first sixty years of its professionalization. For me, the book holds great meaning for his story ends in 1940, just seven years before I began to think of myself as a historian. A college sophomore that year, I had been inspired by a truly great and unusually helpful teacher in a small university in the Northwest. A professor with a PhD from a major graduate program, he taught me history over a wide range in several courses and also helped me leam how to use a library, define and explore historical topics, and write historical essays, and he prepared me for advanced study and gave me great advice on the selection of a graduate program. He did not, however, teach me how the historical profession had become what it was by the 1940s, and he left to others the task of helping me make my way in the profession as a professor and, for a time, the executive secretary of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The author writes from a good vantage point, bases his work on a strong foundation, and presents his findings in a clearly structured essay. He is the deputy director of the American Historical Association (AHA), has worked in it for more than twenty years, has given its members quantitative analyses of issues of interest to them, and includes that approach to history in this book. Furthermore, his notes of nearly sixty pages for a text of less than 200 testify to the richness of his research, and his structure divides the story into three chronological parts, each composed of three topical chapters. The book's first part covers the years from 1880 to 1910. It begins with the efforts of a small but increasing number of historians in major universities to make history scientific. They could accomplish that, they believed, by encouraging historians to base their work on primary sources, providing education on an advanced level that emphasized the seminar and led to the PhD, and demanding that the doctoral graduates publish their dissertations. This is what this generation of historians did at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Columbia, and an expanding number of other universities, but the men did not limit their attention to academic institutions. They recognized that historians were also doing work of great value for the historical enterprise in other places: archives, historical societies, and secondary schools, so the academics reached out to these historians and drew them into the project. Furthermore, the AHA and the American Historical Review were established during this period and became important contributors. …