American Historical Profession Research Articles

Conversations with Colleagues: On Becoming an American Jewish Historian ed. by Jeffrey S. Gurock

Reviewed by: Conversations with Colleagues: On Becoming an American Jewish Historian ed. by Jeffrey S. Gurock Leslie Woodcock Tentler Conversations with Colleagues: On Becoming an American Jewish Historian. Edited by Jeffrey S. Gurock. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018. 270 pp. This is a most unusual book, for which I am a most unusual reviewer. The sixteen essays that make up Conversations with Colleagues are scholarly autobiographies, as much personal as intellectual in content. "The personal always fuels and impacts what drives our work," as Shuly Rubin Schwartz explains in the course of her contribution (196). As for me, I am a historian of American Catholicism, only partly familiar with the work of the scholars who are featured in this thoughtful volume. What could possibly justify my reviewer's role? Only this, perhaps: that the trajectory of American Jewish history over the past century has been strikingly similar to that of American Catholic history. Scholars in these [End Page 557] two seemingly disparate fields also face a similar dilemma as they look to the future. Practitioners in both fields of study would presumably benefit from mutual exchange. Like the field of American Jewish history, American Catholic history prior to the mid-twentieth century was largely the province of well-intentioned amateurs. The overriding concern in both cases was to shore up the bonds of community—a multi-ethnic community, in both instances—and to establish the American bona fides of the group in question. The question of how to be simultaneously both American and Jewish is the fundamental question, as Jonathan D. Sarna notes in his essay; the same could be said of Catholics. The late 1940s saw the advent in both fields of study of a new generation of professional historians—small in number, to be sure, but often distinguished in their output. They frequently served as mentors to a rising generation of graduate students who ultimately transformed both fields in the 1970s and after, due both to their numbers and generous sense of who mattered as historical actors. Women appeared on the social-historical stage, along with ethnic and racial and, more tentatively, sexual minorities. A new emphasis on quantification opened up important insights into the demographic past. The explosion of creative scholarship in both fields did not attract much attention from the larger American historical enterprise. As late as 1995, Deborah Dash Moore could deliver a conference paper decrying the continued marginality of American Jewish history to the American historical profession and indeed to Judaic studies, as well. I had published an article just two years earlier called "On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History." The accumulation of solid historical work and growing numbers of graduate student acolytes did eventually make a difference. Both fields now enjoy what might be called prosperity, although that state is more robust for historians of American Judaism. Catholic and Jewish studies programs and endowed chairs in both fields have proliferated over the past two decades, even at secular universities. "I struggled to win recognition from Vassar's history department as an American Jewish historian," Moore remembers of her early days in that college's Department of Religion, back in the 1970s (123). She now holds a named chair of Jewish history at the University of Michigan. The frustrations engendered by the years of marginality linger in some of the essays, perhaps especially those by women, who fought for acceptance on two fronts. Historians of women, who struggled for recognition in the profession at large, have often been reluctant to incorporate Jewish women into their liberationist narrative, from which Catholic women have also been excluded. But the essays mainly speak of success—success both in personal terms and in terms of the field these [End Page 558] scholars have done so much to transform. Many practitioners in my own field of study could tell a similar story. But therein lurks a certain danger. Both Catholics and Jews, after all, are part of a larger American narrative and even a transnational one, given the global connections of both communities. Making those connections is not easy, even for historians who are broadly trained. Might it not be the case that the more our...

The Legend of Marcus Whitman and the Transformation of the American Historical Profession

This article explores the secularization of the American historical profession through the lens of an early twentieth-century historical controversy: the debunking of the legend that nineteenth-century missionary Marcus Whitman saved the Pacific Northwest from becoming a British possession. The Whitman controversy was a key skirmish in an ongoing, and still unresolved, debate about what constitutes right practices and ideations of history in the American academy, what counts as undue historical bias, and what place (if any) appeals to religion should have in academic historical discourse. Through the Whitman debate and other early twentieth-century historical battles, Protestant providential narratives of history were purged from academic textbooks and providential historians marginalized from the academy. Taking a cue from the evolutionary schemas of religious studies scholars, professional historians cast tales like the Whitman legend—and the providential narratives that undergirded them—as primitive myths unfit for a modernizing society. The Whitman controversy thus serves as a case study into the American historical profession's transformation at the turn of the twentieth century, a transformation that remains contested and incomplete.

"Things to be Forgotten": African American Family Histories, Silences, and the American Historical Profession in the Post-emancipation Era

L’intervention de Kendra Field s'inscrivait dans le cadre de ses propres travaux de recherche consacres a la question de la memoire familiale africaine-americaine, a ses modalites de transmission et ses nombreuses implications a la fois au sein de la sphere privee mais aussi a l'interieur du monde universitaire. En effet, Kendra Field soutient que ses observations sur le sujet de l'histoire familiale – qui fut le point de depart de son ouvrage Growing Up with the Country : Family Race, and Na...

The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition & the Renewal of Catholic History by Christopher Shannon & Christopher O. Blum (review)

Reviewed by: The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition & the Renewal of Catholic History by Christopher Shannon & Christopher O. Blum Sandra Yocum The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition & the Renewal of Catholic History. By Christopher Shannon & Christopher O. Blum. Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2014. 174 pp. Shannon and Blum describe The Past as Pilgrimage as “an essay in the literal sense of the word” (xiii), a carefully crafted argument outlining “principles” for and providing exemplars of authentic Catholic history, narratives detailing the past within the overarching story of God’s salvific work in Jesus Christ. The authors identify this work as part of their generation’s task of recovering Christian traditions, reclaimed from the wasteland of post-Vatican II Catholicism. Recovery here is more than an academic exercise; it generates a renewal of authentic Christian culture which sustains Catholic historical work, manifested in teaching as much as publications, within a community where faith integrates every aspect of daily living. The Past as Pilgrimage presents the argument in four chapters, bookended with an Introduction and Conclusion. As the first pages make clear, Alasdair McIntyre’s understanding of tradition serves as starting point and inspiration for their vision of the historian’s task, i.e., to provide narratives in “the service of the common good” (5) within the Catholic intellectual tradition. The Introduction features two examples that “display the art of the true narrative” (5): three sermons extolling the virtuous St. King Louis IX to Louis XIV’s subjects and The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. The first chapter deftly extends Peter Novick’s account of “objectivity” and the modern American historical profession to American Catholic historians. Shannon and Blum trace specific Catholic scholars’ improper “inculturation” (61) placing Catholicism within secular history’s nationalist liberal narrative to produce a “faithless history” (77) devoid of a “distinctly Catholic historical imagination” (78). The second chapter offers a way out of modernity’s faithless master narrative, predicated on the Catholic historian’s task of making right judgments. Shannon and Blum identify two kinds of “intrinsic principles of historical judgment. … narrative and dramatic” (92). Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History and John Henry [End Page 103] Newman’s The Church of the Fathers illustrate historical narratives which assume the unity of faith and reason and testify to “the true immortality of the communion of saints” (108). The final two chapters turn to contemporary Catholic historians, first, Eamon Duffy, and then Benedict XVI. Following the Marxist-inspired British cultural historians, most notably, E.P. Thompson, Duffy illustrates “a proper inculturation of the achievements of modern professional standards”(61). Beginning with the critically acclaimed The Stripping of the Altars, Duffy’s writings present “Catholic History as the Communion of Saints” (128). Benedict XVI’s Wednesday addresses on the saints (general audiences, 2006-2011) provide “A Papal Proposal for a Renewed Hagiography” (139) within an “implicit master-narrative” in which “friendship with Christ” animates the Christian culture that gave rise to Europe’s civilization (148). Shannon and Blum conclude the essay inviting serious engagement with rather than assent to their proposals, but their examples and claims may test the patience of even the most generous reader, especially those who, like me, come from the generation roundly indicted as producing faithless history. Yet strong reactions seem appropriate given that the questions go to the very heart of a Catholic historian’s work. Perhaps others, like me, will resonate with their desire to foster a Catholic intellectual community which encourages creativity in teaching and writing, beyond narrow academic monographs, to make the depth and breadth of Christianity come alive in the collective imagination of contemporary Christians. Still any serious discussion among Catholic historians will prove difficult at best, and here I offer only one example. A lingering unease arose in me from the authors’ persistent use of “he” in reference to the generic “historian,” reinforced in choosing only men as exemplars of “the historian’s craft.” The authors might well dismiss my unease as that liberal penchant for cheap equality rather than hard-won Christian excellence given that women are mentioned as historical subjects, but my unease arises from the essay’s particular focus: the historian’s agency in exercising “right...

Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away from Past Interpretations (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away from Past Interpretations Gregg Cantrell Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away from Past Interpretations. Edited by Walter L. Buenger and Arnoldo De León. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011. Pp. 318. Tables, notes, index. ISBN 9781603442350, $24.95 paper.) For many of us who teach, write, and think about Texas history, no single book has proven more valuable than a volume of essays edited twenty years ago by Walter L. Buenger and the late Robert A. Calvert. Texas Through Time: Evolving Interpretations (1991) featured a cast of that generation’s best Texas historians writing critical, sometimes damning, essays on the past and present state of Texas historiography. With a balanced mix of chronological and topical chapters, tied together by a provocative introductory essay by the editors, it painted a picture of Texas historical writing that had been characterized by a century of hero-worship, mythologizing, and cultural chauvinism. When its essays were being written in the late 1980s, the “new social history” was no longer very new in the American historical profession, but it was not yet the mainstream in the Lone Star State. Texas social historians, many of whom contributed essays to the volume, were still fighting an uphill battle to debunk old myths and to include the stories of women, Indians, Tejanos, African Americans, and ordinary Texans in the grand narrative of the state’s history. As a sequel to that book, Beyond Texas Through Time takes stock of the field two decades later. With only six chapters compared to the original’s twelve, the strictly chronological chapters have been dropped, leaving Buenger to write the lead essay on the overall current state of Texas historiography, Pekka Hämäläinen on Indian history, Keith J. Volanto on political, economic, and military history, Michael Phillips on race and gender, Carlos Kevin Blanton on diversity and “Historical Imagination,” and Nancy Beck Young on modernization. All are valuable contributions. Historians who concentrate on a specific era will wish that the chronological chapters had remained, but perhaps the new organizational scheme reflects the disintegration of tradition that characterizes the profession as a whole in recent years. The result is more overlap and repetition than one might hope for. For example, a casual browser might wonder how Michael Phillips’s essay with the subtitle “Race, Gender, and the ‘Other Texans’” will differ from Carlos Blanton’s on “The Diversity of People, Place, and Historical Imagination.” And indeed, these two essays do cover much of the same ground (which occasionally brings them into interesting conflict with one another). To cite specific examples of repetition, Neil Foley’s The White Scourge is discussed in five of the six essays; individual books by Juliana Barr, Pekka Hämäläinen, and Judith MacArthur all appear in four different [End Page 405] chapters. Of course, any editor who has ever commissioned a volume of essays knows the difficulty of predicting, much less directing, what any group of independent-minded scholars will write, and I would be surprised if the final product bears a very close resemblance to the outline the editors drew up when the project was conceived. What unites the six essays is their conclusion that much has changed since 1991. Buenger’s nuanced introductory chapter deftly summarizes those changes: First, the old triumphalist Texas history is still alive and well, albeit stripped of its most blatantly racist and sexist trappings. Second, social history has gone mainstream and exists in fairly robust quality and quantity alongside the older forms. But the most striking development is the extent to which a “third truth” (Buenger’s term) has joined the first two—the rise of the what might be called the “new cultural studies,” a set of approaches influenced by the broader currents of recent postmodernist thought. All of the essays cite examples of how the best new works on Texas place the state in a broader regional, national, or even international context; how our understanding of Texas has benefited from comparisons with other places; and how it has become more theoretical and interdisciplinary. Above all, these essays demonstrate how we have moved away from chauvinistic...

Suddenly Staughton

Suddenly Staughton David S. Brown (bio) Carl Mirra. The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2010. ix + 224 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Staughton Lynd is hot. Over the past year or so a number of Lynd projects, compilations, and re-editions have appeared. These include the marital memoir Stepping Stones (2009), written with his wife Alice; From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader (2010); and a fresh printing of his 1967 Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution with a new forward by Robin Einhorn. And now comes Carl Mirra's engaging political biography. Lazarus-like, the radical Lynd, banished from the academy some forty years ago, is suddenly a bona fide icon. More than a historian, he has become a mythic knight-errant in the folklore of the American historical profession. We seem to like our generational totems in threes. A canonical review of twentieth-century historical writing in the United States includes the following typology: progressive scholars Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, and Charles Beard problematized the past by reading conflict into the American narrative; then along came postwar liberals Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Hofstadter, and C. Vann Woodward who collectively emphasized complexity and consensus; but their reign foundered before a revived radicalism, peaking in the 1960s, that was associated with Howard Zinn, Jesse Lemisch, and Lynd. This last cluster has, in recent years, drawn increasing attention. The controversial culture-war debates of the 1980s and the subsequent Near Eastern invasions and occupations have produced, in some quarters of the academy, a renewed interest in the possibilities of oppositional scholarship. In this regard, Lynd and his cohorts embody the promise of providing a "usable past"—the blending of critical research and dissenting politics—to address contemporary questions. You can count Mirra among the converted. "In the interest of complete disclosure," he writes, "I must state I share many of Lynd's political views and decided to write this biography in part to accent America's radical tradition" (p. 3). To be sure, his book is peopled with heroes and villains. At its core rests a generationally informed clash between Left and liberal scholars [End Page 354] to define the nation's past and thus shape its future. Mirra interprets Lynd's famous Sixties' struggle with the Yale history department as an important beachhead in this conflict. Briefly, the Yalies denied tenure to Lynd—author of three scholarly books and, by all accounts, a sterling classroom instructor. Then a slew of Chicago schools labored, without luck, to push a Lynd appointment through their administrations. Each individual rejection—amidst a then robust job market—builds the case that a defensive profession refused to make space for the kind of historical revisionism and personal commitment to social justice advanced by Lynd. He fell victim, in other words, to a firm, if informal, blacklist. Without this drama, the story of Lynd's academic turn lacks luster. Indeed his judicious study of anti-Federalism in upstate New York or various essays tracing the relationship between race and the Constitution hardly beg biographical treatment. Rather, it is the scholar-in-the-streets example of Lynd's life—his early support for the civil rights movement, uncompromising antimilitarism, and principled dissent from the main pillars of postwar liberalism—that animates Mirra's narrative. More than a compiler of status quo–challenging texts, Lynd's research and politics earned, by turns, both admiration and condemnation in an academy that never quite knew what to do with him. Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Lynd was the son of Robert and Helen Lynd, authors of the famous Middletown study of 1920s Muncie, Indiana. Pronounced progressives, their book cut against the popular view of an era defined by prosperity. Charting "Middletown's" rocky road from a mainly agrarian to a predominantly industrial city, they emphasized its class- and race-based segregation, lack of labor unions, and conformist culture. This is all suggestive in regard to Lynd filius' strain of go-against-the-grain scholarship; and Mirra offers brief but thoughtful paragraphs on the cross-generational distance separating Old and New Left—the mater et...

The Father of Alabama Historians: Professor George Petrie and His Survey of Slavery

The Father of Alabama Historians: Professor George Petrie and His Survey of Slavery GEORGE PETRIE (1866–1947) WAS ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL historians in the American South during the early twentieth century. As a professor of history at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (API), now Auburn University, he influenced a generation of southern historians and earned a national reputation as a leader in higher education. He is, however, probably best remembered for organizing and coaching Auburn’s first football team in 1892. It is unfortunate that his academic contributions have not earned him a place in the field of American historiography, for Petrie was not only “the father of Auburn football ” but was also “the father of Alabama historians.” Although he published little, his research was on the cutting edge of the historiography of his time and his methodology for the study of Alabama slavery was years ahead of the mainstream of the historical profession. In 1907 he developed a questionnaire and conducted a survey of slavery in Alabama with the intention of writing a book on the subject. From 1907 through 1913 Petrie and his students interviewed hundreds of black and white Alabamians. Sociologists had conducted this type of research for several years, but Petrie was one of the first historians to implement a survey in his research. Yet, as with most of Petrie’s research, it failed to yield a monograph as his enthusiasm eventually waned and he became interested in other topics.1 A N T H O N Y D O N A L D S O N Anthony Donaldson teaches history at Auburn University. His research focuses on the history of the American South and the history of higher education. 1 Auburn University was originally founded in 1872 as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. In 1899 the name was officially changed to the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. Finally, in 1960, the name was changed to Auburn University. For a discussion of George Petrie’s influence on athletics at Auburn see Mike Jernigan, Auburn Man: The Life & Times of George Petrie (Montgomery, 2007), and Brenda Harper Mattson, “George Petrie: The Early Years, 1866–1892” (master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1983). T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 38 Much of Petrie’s philosophy regarding the teaching and study of history resulted from his experiences as a student in the PhD program at Johns Hopkins University from 1889 to 1891. Johns Hopkins was one of the first universities in the United States to adopt the German model of scholarship. Several Hopkins professors had received graduate degrees from the best German universities and they brought their enthusiasm for the new scientific approach to scholarship to the school. In many ways Hopkins was different from other American universities. Visiting lecturers, for example, helped to keep students aware of the latest methods of research and scholarly debates . Probably the most important contribution Hopkins made to American higher education was the “seminary,” or seminar, which many of the European-trained faculty introduced to their students. In these classes a group of twenty or thirty graduate students discussed various topics, listened to a professor’s lecture, or wrote essays on their research. The seminar was modeled after the laboratory approach of the natural sciences, whereby, according to Jurgen Herbst, “research was to begin with the detailed examination of physical objects that could be measured, weighed, analyzed, and compared, and thus humanistic and social studies were to become ‘scientific.’” The results of this research were written, discussed, and eventually published in books and scholarly journals in order to stimulate more study of a given subject. Another significant Hopkins contribution was its publication of scientific and scholarly journals and books, including Studies in Historical and Political Science. Through its press the school provided a medium for scholars to publish work that commercial publishers would not undertake.2 2 According to historian Peter Novick in chapter 2 of his work, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK, 1988), those historians who received their graduate educations at German universities returned to the United States with...

Reimagining Military History in the Classroom

The military history of the United States represents an essential thread in the full cloth of American history. Without it, the entire fabric of American history may unravel. Still, especially since the Vietnam era—and despite significant popular interest in the subject—it slowly has lost its place in the nation's primary and secondary classrooms. The current National Standards for United States History include little instruction on some of the most transformative events in American history. In the formative years of the American historical profession before World War I, military history enjoyed an influential position. Military professionals such as Alfred Thayer Mahan served as president of the American Historical Association (AHA), and professional historical associations pondered at length—as the AHA did in 1913—“Who Shall Write Our Military History?” Especially since the Vietnam era, however, the study and teaching of military history on the college and university level has dropped off dramatically....

DAVID S. BROWN. Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. xxiii, 291. $27.50

Professional historians will find this book engaging, illuminating, and at times frustrating. David S. Brown carefully examines Richard Hofstadter's personal life, skillfully locates him in his changing cultural and political contexts, and provides fair-minded critical analysis of his brilliant and influential work. Given that Hofstadter's writings ranged over American history from 1750 to 1970 and challenged many prevailing interpretations, accurately characterizing and gauging the lasting significance of his contributions is no mean feat. Although specialists inevitably will quarrel with some of Brown's judgments, his wide-ranging research and judicious assessments make his study a solid guide to one of the twentieth century's most important historians. Hofstadter (1916–1970) was born and raised in Buffalo, son of a Polish-born Jewish father and a mother of German Protestant descent. He was christened in her Lutheran faith, sang in the church choir, and gravitated toward Judaism only after his mother's death in 1926. In his own words, Hofstadter “spent a lot of years acquiring a Jewish identity, which is more cultural than religious” (p. 53). That identity remained murky to many in the American historical profession and even at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. and taught for almost his entire career. Hofstadter grew to be at home in New York and refused numerous offers from other universities. Yet he remained suspicious of the city's cosmopolitan parochialism—of all American parochialisms among the most constricting because among the least self-conscious—and gently recommended trips west of the Hudson to those who railed against southern and western hayseeds. Many of his richest insights as a historian derived from his status as an outsider surprised to find, as the categories changed beneath his feet, that he had become an insider. He worked hard to achieve the intellectual independence that became his hallmark; his taste for irony came naturally.

Bringing Together Social Histories

It was bound to happen eventually. Since the 1960s, social history-including the study of race, class, gender, and ethnicity-has attained prominence as a vibrant field in the American historical profession. As all students of history already know, the widespread influence of social history can be seen at conferences, in the classroom, and in print. The methods and interpretations of social historians often creep into even traditional narratives. Average people and their everyday lives have become an essential part of the story of the past. What is less widely known throughout the profession is that a parallel transition has occurred within the field of military history. The late 1960s also introduced what would come to be known as the new military history-an attempt to go beyond traditional operational accounts of battles. Sometimes eschewing combat entirely, new military historians embraced a variety of methods to focus on military institutions, military thought, and civil-military relations. At the same time, others turned their attention to the men and women in uniform, and the results have been striking. Over the past thirty years, practitioners of military social history have explored the lives of everyday people in the military, in times of peace and war. This bottom-up approach has added depth to our understanding of the motivations, course, and effects of military service. More importantly, military social history has helped put a human face on war. What it has not done is make a real and lasting connection to the changes in the larger profession. For all their similarities-and with only a few exceptions, for example, Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War (1995)-social history and military social history have grown up quite independent of one another. The result of this mutual ignorance is that military and social history often seem to be in opposition-two fields with nothing in common and little to learn from the other. All too often, sometimes even within departments, this opposition manifests itself in hostility or disdain.

Don't Know Much about (the History of) History

Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (1988) was the first book I read as a graduate student. It served as my introduction to the guild I was about to join, and a marvelous introduction it proved to be. The book surveyed over 100 years of American historical practice, evaluating the careers of all of the major figures in the profession and many of the minor ones as well. It managed quite deftly to balance a consideration of a weighty methodological issue-the question of how historians pursued the elusive goal of objectivity-with a sizeable amount of juicy insider gossip. What I did not understand as I sat in my first-year seminar, and what I have only come to appreciate subsequently, was that Novick's book filled a large void. There simply was not, and there still is not, much writing about the nature, philosophy, or even history of American history. That Novick, while an American, is himself a scholar of European history only seemed to underscore this historiographic lacuna. (It also caused a certain annoyance among some number of American historians.) By and large, American historians have been an unreflective lot, a prosaic group who go about their business without giving too much thought to the epistemological challenges inherent in doing that business. Americans have been writing history, in the modem sense, as long as the Europeans have, but we have not produced many philosophers of history. It would be hard to come up with a list of American historians to rank alongside of Leopold von Ranke, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georges Trevelyan, Marc Bloch, and Michel Foucault, to name several, as intellectuals who thought deeply about the nature of history and of historical practice. Indeed, as Novick pointed out, by the mid-1980s, when he was at work on his book, the American Historical Review had largely eliminated historiological questions from its pages; the annual gatherings of the American Historical Association did not find room for any sessions on epistemological questions; and the editorial board of History and Theory,

Notes on the Boothbay Harbor Conference

September/October 2004 · Historically Speaking39 Notes on the Boothbay Harbor Conference George Huppert The 2004 conference of our Society took place in an unusual setting. We met in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, from June 3-6. Our host was the Spruce Point Inn, an exquisite seaside resort hidden amid woods and surrounded by the ocean. Some of our participants may have harbored doubts about setting out to meet in this distant rendezvous , but their doubts were dispelled on arrival. Others signed up for the conference, coming from as far away as Berkeley or London , precisely because ofthe setting's powerful appeal. For three days we were able to talk to each other under ideal circumstances, mostly outdoors. The weather was perfect. Our plenary sessions were held in the beautiful conference center finished only hours before our arrival. We broke with tradition by avoiding corporate hotels in big cities. We also departed from conventional ways by having papers precirculated and asking presenters to speak informally instead ofreading prepared texts. These measures went a long way toward erasing the distinction between panel and audience . In most sessions this resulted in lively and fruitful exchanges among all those present . We continued our discussions under the tent adjacent to the conference center, where breakfast and lunch buffets were served by the inn's fine staff. Some ofus still had enough energy in reserve to go on talking into the night. Some of us brought our children who could be heard squealing and splashing in the swimming pool while the imposing figure of Donald Yerxa floated past them. Meanwhile state of the American historical profession serious workwas going Gn in the conference in an atmosphere of rising hilarity, beginrooms where we found ourselves adventur- ning with Kuklick's dissection ofthe foibles ing way beyond the confines ofour fields of of our profession and rising to storms of expertise. It is not often that specialists in laughter in response to Ribuffo's practiced Renaissance studies or labor historyjoin dis- comedy routines. As is to be expected, much of importance happened outside of the formal sessions. The relaxed setting —more like a retreat than a business meeting—allowed us to avoid the usual distractions . Communication with the outside world was severed . No cell phones ringing, no e-mail. The sense of having happily stepped out of our ordinary activities permeated the entire meeting. Instead of arranging job interviews, we arranged a concert offered to us by Deborah Coclanis and her friends. Our experiment with new ways ofinteracting is likely to influence our next meeting . We may want to pre-circulate papers again—we may even go so far as to read them carefully before the meeting—and we may try to retain the informality we achieved in Boothbay at our next meeting, in 2006, when we will descend on the Chapel Hill campus at the invitation of our president, Peter Coclanis. For three days we were able to talk to each other under ideal circumstances , mostly outdoors. . . . The sense ofhaving happily stepped out ofour ordinary activities permeated the entire meeting. eussions of South Indian historiography, Russian church history,Jeffersonian democracy , or Holocaust memoirs. We did not wander too far from the theme of the conference, which was defined as a reflection on the current state of the discipline . Roundtables on world history and global identity were among the broadest topics addressed. Elsewhere we discussed the state ofthe art in Renaissance, Enlightenment , and Latin American historiography , as well as new developments in the study of medieval Poland, modern Islam, and Black nationalism. Among the sessions that provoked a good deal ofargument were the Christopher Lasch Lecture delivered by Sean Wilentz and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's discussion ofworld history. Bruce Kuklick, Leo Ribuffo, and Marc Trachtenberg offered their critical summary ofthe current George Huppert, pastpresident ofthe Historical Society, is the author ofseveral books and articles on early modern European history. In 1989 he was decorated as Chevalier de l'Ordre des PalmesAcade?niques by the French government. ...

Comment on Kuklick

September/October 2004 Historically Speaking 17 ally framed as revelations and still leavened with compulsory cloying moralism. For instance, the historical establishment has rediscovered that industrial workers spent time in churches as well as factories and, guess what, one venue affected the other. Similarly, tight-knitcommunitiesunder stress produced conservative activists as well as heroic radicals and, guess what, lots ofthe conservatives were women. But there is hope for something beyond caution and quibbling. You do nothave to be a demographer or futurologist, only a regular at facultymeetings, to notice that the long predicted wave ofretirements will finallystart to occur within a decade. Then, briefly, demand for academic historians will once again exceed supply for roughly a decade. Another forty-year job crisis will undoubtedly follow. During this interlude, however, free spirits among Generation X-ers and the "millennial" generation that follows may feel sufficientlysecure to problematize questions that are significantly problematic. In the meantime, ain't it awful? You bet. It always is. Leo P. Ribuffo is Society ofthe Cincinnati George Washington DistinguishedProfessor ofHistory at George Washington University. He is the author of"Confessions ofan Accidental (or Perhaps Overdetermined) Historian , " in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese andElisabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds., Reconstructing History: The Emergence ofa New Historical Society (Routledge, 1999), 143-163. 1 Bruce Kuklick, The Rise ofAmerican Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (Yale University Press, 1977); Churchmen and Philosophers: FromJonathan Edwards toJohn Dewey (Yale University Press, 1985); Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930 (Princeton University Press, 1996); To Every Time A Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia 1909-1976 (Princeton University Press, 1991); and "Writing the History ofPractice : The Humanities and Baseball, widi a Nod to Wrestling," in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds., Reconstructing History: The Emergence ofa New Historical Society (Routledge , 1999), 176-88. 2 Almost all ofthe leaders ofour trade during the quarter century after World War ? affirmed the political, sociological, and psychological "vital center " (to recall ArthurM. Schlesinger,Jr.'s famous phrase), but they did not necessarily discern or affirm an American consensus. Accordingly, following Gene Wise, I prefer to call them counterprogressive historians. See Wise, American HistoricalExplanations :A Strategyfor GroundedInquiry (Dorsey, 1977). 3 In conversation over a beer. 4 Richard Rorty, "Philosophical Convictions," Nation, June 14, 2004, 54. 5 Bruce Kuklick, "History as a Way ofLearning," American Quarterly 22 (1970): 609-628. Comment on Kuklick Marc Trachtenberg What is going to determine the future ofthe American historical profession? For Bruce Kuklick, sheer numbers are of fundamental importance. The profession, he thinks, has become so large that it no longer has, or indeed can have, a clear sense ofwhat it is about. In the old days you knew what the important works were. You could see which works defined "the contours of historical knowledge" at any particular point in time. But today there are so many historians and there is so much pressure to publish that no one can hope to develop a sense for what, in scholarly terms, pulls the community ofhistorians together. Indeed—to draw out what for me is one of the key implications of Kuklick's argument —there is not much that makes our occupational group a real profession, with a distinctidentityand a broadlyaccepted set of standards for "authoritatively evaluating" scholarly work. Instead, what we have is a mass ofpeople laboring in particular subfields . The work they produce is rarely of interest to scholars working in other subfields . People write for very narrow audiences , producing books and articles that, as a general rule, almost no one reads. What passes for the profession is reallya congeries ofspecialized groups with highly parochial interests—groups, moreover, ofprivileged individuals, shielded by the tenure system, turned in on themselves, cut off from the larger society, incapable, by and large, of even giving theirundergraduate students the sort ofinstruction they need. The problem, according to Kuklick, is rooted inwhathe calls "mass professionalization ," although perhaps (ifwe bear in mind what a profession is supposed to be) "mass deprofessionalization" might be a better term. There are just so many people trained to be historians, and so much work that has to be published, that things more or less had to develop along these...

Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment

Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment

Clio's Dream; or, Has the Muse Departed from the Temple? Implications for Library History

The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century. By Thomas Bender, Philip M. Katz, Colin Palmer, and the Committee on Graduate Education (AHA). Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 200 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-252-02898-8. The desire to reflect upon the past may be as old as humanity itself—how are we to know? After all, the recent epistemologically driven forays into the raison d'être of history and historical practice speak to a certain anxiety among historians surveying their intellectual and perhaps at times ontological conditions. Whether grounded in historiographic analysis or within a broader concern over the profession and practice of the humanities or social sciences as a whole, historians have much to be proud of and as much to be concerned about. Reflection upon the historical enterprise is not new, nor has it been wanting; to the contrary, it has been bound up in the seasoned musings of historians who, having reached the ends of their careers, deem it worthy to set their thoughts on that which has taken their lives to task.1 These thoughts and musings often offer more of the author, as either academic or in some fashion a professional historian, than anything truly historiographically concrete. There are many reasons for this. The distance and acuity required to examine one's professional vocation is a rare attribute. It demands the ability to weigh the contours and substance of one's intellectual and sociological existence as practitioner and professor of a discipline.2 Socratic admonition aside, it demands the most vigilant and concerted self-examination, at times ruthlessly honest and disquieting. Perhaps, in a strange way, philosophy of history or its more historically grounded brethren, historiography, is so terribly difficult to countenance. Those who specialize in [End Page 429] and practice historiography, especially its more pure variety (i.e., the history of history, epistemological and philosophical examination, over event-oriented historiography, e.g., the Enlightenment as historical problem), constitute a rare scholarly species. In the professional environment in which historical practice is situated, historiography and philosophy of history are indeed rarefied pursuits. Certainly, courses at the undergraduate and graduate level exist, but as necessary components of scholarly acculturation, not as means and ends unto themselves. As a specialty, historiography and the philosophy of history are tolerated intellectual baggage, necessary for becoming a historian but not to be misconstrued as doing history. With this in mind, it is never easy to examine one's own profession from within, for as practitioner such existential introspection demands an ability to step aside and peer into the mirror. Doing so opens one to the exigencies and vulnerabilities of soul-searching if not professional pulse reading. Any realignment or radical change in course can be fairly difficult and at times exceedingly open to criticism. Admittedly, such self-examination has its rewards and its possible burdens. Periodically, professions embark upon such a course in keeping with their prerogatives as stewards of their special vocation and knowledge.3 As the academy has evolved, attempts to ascertain where the disciplines are and where they are heading have become critically imperative for sustained scholarly well-being and intellectual vitality. During the last thirty to forty years scholarly disciplines have undergone pervasive influences and transformation, so much so that most of the humanities and social sciences may be professionally unrecognizable to older practitioners.4 New fields of interest, specialties, and even subdisciplines have been born.5 Critically generated theoretical analysis informs more traditionally accepted domains of knowledge and practice. Consequently, an attempt to get our bearings is paramount to understanding just where the center is within a discipline in both theory and practice. As the American historical profession has undergone the rigors of the transformation of American higher education, so too has it accommodated those changes implicit within the academy. Continued...

The Origins of the Historical Society: A Personal View

June 2003 · Historically Speaking47 1980 and 1992 El Salvador, with U.S. aid provided under the Reagan Doctrine, defeated the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). In all these instances the U.S. strategy called for carrots and sticks—aggressive militaryoperations againstthe rebels combined with liberalizing reforms to win over the uncommitted populace. And in all these cases the U.S. and its allies were successful. The glaring exception is Vietnam, where the U.S. pursued a similar strategy with a notable lack of success. America's failure was due to manyfactors, includingaham-handed military campaign that ignored successful counterinsurgencytechniquesofthepast But theultimate problemwas thatthe communist forcesoperatingin SouthVietnamhad a"deep rear" in North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China. The U.S. was loath to take decisive military action against any ofthese states for fear ofwidening the war. As a result, the insurgents alwayshad asafebase ofoperations across theborderandsteadysupplylines along the Ho ChiMinh trail. Even so, theVietcong didnotwin thewar. Theymerelysoftenedup the enemy for the conventional invasion that North Vietnam mounted in 1975. The question today is: does Iraq more closely resemble Vietnam or, on the other hand, thenumerous placeswhere U.S. counterinsurgency strategies prevailed? The answer is the latter. In the first place, Vietnam 's topography—lots ofjungles and mountains —was much more favorable to guerrilla operations thanthe deserts andtowns ofIraq. And, unlike in Vietnam, it is doubtful that any neighboring country will want to give long-termsupportto a Baathistguerrilla campaign againstcoalition forces. While neither Syria norIran,whichshare longborderswith Iraq, is friendlyto the U.S., theydo nothave particularlywarm feelings for Saddam Hussein either. In any case, neither state enjoys superpower patronage, so they would be at the mercy ofU.S. forces ifthey fomented a wave ofterrorist attacks against the occupation authorities. But simply because a guerrilla campaign against the U.S. is unlikely to succeed does not mean the occupation itselfwill be a success . Thatwill require a concerted campaign of"nation building" similar to those the U.S. has previouslyundertakenin countries ranging from Germany to Haiti. The lesson of those campaigns is clear: where U.S. troops stay the course for the long term (Germany, Italy,Japan, Philippines, Bosnia, Kosovo) they can change life for the better. Where they pull out too quickly (Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Somalia) things can go to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. That's apointworthrememberingas PresidentBush vows to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq. Only ifthe U.S. militaryisprepared fora long, long stay will the Bush administration have any hope ofcarryingoutitsvowto turnIraqinto a nascent democracy. Max Boot is Olrn SeniorFellow at the Council onForeignRelationsandauthorqfThe SavageWars ofPeace: SmallWars and the Rise ofAmerican Power (BasicBooks, 2002). The Origins of the Historical Society: A Personal View Marc Trachtenberg What exactlyhappened in the American historical profession in the late 20th century? I can talk at length abouthowthings changed duringthe period I've been in the profession—thatis, the years since I started graduate school in 1966. 1 can talkaboutthe sources ofmyown discontent. I can talk about the things that led me personallyto playa certain role in the establishmentofthe Historical Societyfiveyears ago. I can, andwill, talkaboutall these things, but I still don'treallyunderstand whathappened. But I do know how those developments affected me personally. I'm a diplomatichistorian. The termitself is terriblyold-fashioned and, certainlybythe 1980s ifnot earlier, the whole field ofdiplomatic history had come to be viewed as old hat. That field, I think it's fair to say, was pushed to the margins ofthe profession. For that reason, diplomatic historians like me came to be particularly sensitive to whatwas going on within the profession. I certainly became quite disaffected. Whatwas so disturbingaboutwhatIsaw goingon around me? Two things really. First, I could not believe some ofthe things people were studying. I could not believe what was oftenheldup as "cuttingedge" historical work. (I wondered when I heard thatphrase: cutting through what? And was "cutting edge" simply a euphemism for "trendy"?) In any event, those topics struck me, increasingly , as absolutelytrivial. Itwas hard to imagine that people—indeed, apparently the majority of the profession—could actually viewthe kind ofworkthatwas beingheld up in thatwayas important. But the factis thatit was considered important, and thatjudgment 48Historically Speaking · June 2003 went hand in...

On Peter Novick'sThe Holocaust in American Life

n 1988, Peter Novick published That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession,1 in which he criticized the sometime ideal among American historians of writing neutral or objective historical accounts-epitomized in Leopold von Ranke's conception of history written wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (as it actually was). That ideal, Novick argued, was-is-illusory: a noble dream, in Carl Becker's phrase (and not always, according to Novick, all that noble). In The Holocaust in American Life, published in 1999,2 Novick now provides a vivid illustration of his own thesis, though not, one supposes, by design. The tendentiousness and ideological tilt he found in the work of other historians is here on prominent display; his conclusions, too, go beyond the evidence from which his accusations of the artifice of Holocaust centrality and its harmful effects on the American Jewish community and the larger American public allegedly follow. Allegedly, because the three basic conclusions to which Novick lays claim do not in fact follow from his premises: 1. Question: What is the place of the Holocaust in American life? Answer: Large. Too large. For American Jewish life, much too large. 2. Question: What caused this? Answer: Interests and calculations unrelated to the Holocaust: an

On Peter Novick's: The Holocaust in American Life

In 1988, Peter Novick published That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, 1 in which he criticized the sometime ideal among American historians of writing neutral or objective historical accounts--epitomized in Leopold von Ranke's conception of history written "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" ("as it actually was"). That ideal, Novick argued, was--is--illusory: a "noble dream," in Carl Becker's phrase (and not always, according to Novick, all that noble). In The Holocaust in American Life, published in 1999, 2 Novick now provides a vivid illustration of his own thesis, though not, one supposes, by design. The tendentiousness and ideological tilt he found in the work of other historians is here on prominent display; his conclusions, too, go beyond the evidence from which his accusations of the artifice of Holocaust "centrality" and its harmful effects on the American Jewish community and the larger American public allegedly follow. "Allegedly," because the three basic conclusions to which Novick lays claim do not in fact follow from his premises:

History: the Reciprocal Influences

In the spring of 1984, I came across a blisteringly polemical account of the American historical profession in Harper's magazine. Written by Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished conservative scholar of Victorian Britain, it charged her fellow historians with such obsessive eagerness to uncover the smallest details of everyday life in the past that they had lost sight of the truly important things in history: ideas, politics, war and diplomacy. Himmelfarb had no shortage of villains to blame for this dreadful state of affairs, including Marxism, and what Americans would soon come to call "political correctness."

Reform in Rebeldom

Reform in Rebeldom Stephen V. Ash (bio) William Blair. Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. x + 206 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50. What is it about the Confederacy? Why does it so rivet our attention and engage our minds and emotions? It is not simply that Americans are suckers for a lost cause. If that were the case, we might expect to see library shelves crammed with books about the Tories of the Revolutionary War. But we see no such thing, nor do we see armies of reenactors dressed as Tory soldiers; Union Jack bumper stickers, decals, and T-shirts are not plentiful. No, the Confederacy was not just a lost cause but the Lost Cause, and its grip on the American psyche shows no sign of loosening with the passage of the generations. 1 To a certain extent, this Confederate mania is simply a part of Civil War mania, a perennial of American popular culture that blossomed anew in 1990 when public television aired Ken Burns’s series. Yet Rebel fandom seems in some ways to have a separate existence, for it embraces lots of people who find the war as a whole pretty much a bore. Most scholars of the Confederate experience would probably deny that their interest in the subject has much connection with the popular interest. Professional historians complain that the Confederacy buffs do not truly seek to understand the Rebel nation; instead they celebrate it adoringly, and if they read about it at all they do so only to indulge their taste for romance and melodrama—and maybe even their racism. The very mention of Gone with the Wind evokes groans from the academy. And yet there is a curious point of similarity between the popular and the scholarly interest. Talk to Civil War reenactors and you will learn that there is often an oversupply of Confederates at their mock battles and encampments. The Rebels generally outnumber the Yankees, sometimes embarrassingly so—a luxury that the gray-clad armies of 1861–65 rarely enjoyed in their engagements with the enemy. So, too, there seem to be a lot more historians of the Confederacy than of the Union around these days. This cannot be a factor of the relative abundance of documentary sources for the two nations, for in that regard the Union’s predominance is probably even greater than that of its [End Page 580] military forces and industry during the war. Is there, then, some intellectual reason for the disparity in numbers? Is the history of the Confederacy somehow more instructive than that of its opponent? Or are some historians, deep down inside, as much in thrall to the romance of the Confederacy as the buffs they scorn? If William Blair is a Rebel romantic he betrays no trace of it in his book. Indeed, he worries in his introduction that his findings will be misconstrued as evidence for one of the popular myths about the Confederacy—that its people were unified and unwavering in support of the Cause. Blair knows that the Confederacy was plagued by dissension and flagging morale; his purpose is to show how successfully that nation—or at least the part of it he scrutinizes—overcame those problems. Blair thus takes a stand on one of the most contentious and long-lived issues of American historiography: why the South lost the Civil War. In their wartime and postwar writings, many Confederates pointed fingers of blame at one another. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white Southerners swept all that feuding under the rug and reached a consensus: the Confederate people had fought with unanimity and great devotion, but in the end, as Robert E. Lee himself put it, they had been “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” In other words, Yankee muscle triumphed over Rebel patriotism. As this popular consensus was taking shape, however, so was the American historical profession, and many of the scholars who looked at the question of Confederate defeat were not so sure that the Rebel nation’s autopsy report should read “died of a...