EXCEPTIONAL HISTORY? THE ORIGINS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES

History and Theory 47 (May 2008), 200-228 © Wesleyan University 2008 ISSN: 0018-2656

ExcEptIoNal HIStory? tHE orIgINS of HIStorIograpHy IN tHE UNItEd StatES1

EIlEEN Ka-May cHENg

abStract

This essay examines how and why historiography—defined to mean the study of the his-tory of historical writing—first emerged as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry in the United States during the period from 1890 to the 1930s by focusing on the practice of his-toriography by three of the most influential American historiographers whose work spans this period: J. Franklin Jameson, John Spencer Bassett, and Harry Elmer Barnes. Whereas the development of historiography as a field of study signified a recognition that histo-rians and historical writing are themselves products of the historical process, American historiographers in this period at the same time used historiography to further a scientific ideal of objectivity that was premised on the belief in the ability of historians to separate themselves from that process. Modern scholars (notably, Peter Novick) have attributed to scientific historians like Jameson and Bassett a simplistic and naïve positivism; but the ability of these historiographers to recognize the subjective character of historical writing and yet affirm a belief in objectivity reveals that their understanding of historical truth was more complex than modern scholars have acknowledged. In turn, by questioning the belief that the historical profession was originally founded on a naïve faith in the ideal of objec-tive truth, I demonstrate that New Historians like Barnes were more similar to their prede-cessors, the scientific historians, than they (or later scholars) acknowledged. Thus, rather than portraying the shift from scientific history to the New History as a linear trajectory of development from objectivity to a more relativist viewpoint, I argue that New Historians like Barnes at once expressed a greater recognition than his scientific predecessors of how historical writing was the product of its context, while still insisting on his commitment to an ideal of objectivity that divorced the historian from that context.

I. INtrodUctIoN

“What is historiography?” asked Carl Becker in 1938. In response to his own question, Becker defined historiography as the “study of the history of historical study.” While Becker’s definition is one of the widely accepted meanings of the term among historians today, the use of the word “historiography” in this sense was relatively new in Becker’s time.2 The term “historiography” had been used

1. The author would like to thank the members of the Sarah Lawrence writing group—Paula Loscocco, Chi Ogunyemi, Sandra Robinson, Lyde Sizer, and Sarah Wilcox—and the editors and reviewers for History and Theory for their helpful suggestions in improving this essay

�. Carl Becker, “What Is Historiography?,” American Historical Review 44 (1938), �0. Although American historians in this period did not consistently use historiography to mean the study of the history of historical writing, for the sake of clarity and convenience, unless otherwise indicated, I will throughout the essay use the word “historiography” in the way that Becker defined it. See also Daniel

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since the sixteenth century to mean the writing of history or the work of a histo-riographer, which in turn was defined as either a writer of history, or a historian officially appointed by the state.3 Yet by 1934, Webster’s dictionary had added to these meanings the definition of historiography as “[t]he study and criticism of the sources and development of history as a branch of knowledge.”4 The change in the definition of the term “historiography” pointed more fundamentally to the emer-gence of the history of historical writing as a field of study between the 1890s and 1930s, for the very idea that historical writing could itself be a legitimate subject for historical inquiry had begun to develop among American historians only during the 1890s. Thus, the first book-length study of historical writing by an American historian was J. Franklin Jameson’s History of Historical Writing in America, pub-lished in 1891, which was followed by John Spencer Bassett’s The Middle Group of American Historians (1917), and James Shotwell’s Introduction to the History of History (19��). Interest in historiography grew during the 1930s with the publi-cation of the Marcus Jernegan Essays in American Historiography (1937), edited by William T. Hutchinson; Harry Elmer Barnes’s A History of Historical Writing (1937); and Michael Kraus’s A History of American History (1938).

This essay seeks to explain how and why American historians came to recog-nize historiography as a field of study by looking at the practice of historiogra-phy in the United States from 1890 to the 1930s, focusing on three of the most influential American historiographers whose work spans this period—J. Franklin Jameson, John Spencer Bassett, and Harry Elmer Barnes. Not only were these three historians instrumental in establishing historiography as a legitimate histori-cal subject in the United States, but they have also continued to influence our view of the history of historical writing; thus, modern scholars still cite their works on historiography as standard authorities on the subject.5 While Jameson is probably

Woolf, “Disciplinary History and Historical Discourse. A Critique of the History of History: The Case of Early Modern England,” Cromohs � (1997), n. 3, http://www.unifi.it/riviste/cromohs/�_97/woolf.html (accessed December 4, �007), for this usage of the word. Even today, historians use the term in different ways. On the current and varied meanings of the word “historiography,” see Lawrence D. Walker, “Qu’est-ce que l’histoire de l’historiographie?: The History of Historical Research and Writing Viewed as a Branch of the History of Science,” Storia della Storiografia � (198�), 10�; and A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, ed. D. R. Woolf (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), I, xiii. See also J. H. Hexter, “The Rhetoric of History,” History and Theory 6 (1967), 3, on the differing uses of the term “historiography.” On the changing meanings of this term, and Becker’s contribution to that change, see Harry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History (Westport, ct: greenwood press, 1986), 189-191.

3. For these definitions of “historiography” and “historiographer,” see A Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam & Co., 187�), http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AJD�897.0001.001 (accessed May 8, �006), s.v. “historiography,” “historiographer”; Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, ed. Noah Porter (Springfield, MA: G & C. Merriam Co., 1913), http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/ARTFL/forms_unrest/webster.form.html (accessed May 7, �006), s.v. “historiography,” “historiographer”; and Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “histori-ography,” “historiographer.” On the use of the word “historiographer” to mean “historian,” see also Bert James Loewenberg, American History in American Thought: Christopher Columbus to Henry Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 197�), 11. See Denys Hay, “The Historiographers Royal in England and Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review 30 (1951), 15-�9, on the origins and use of the term “historiographer” to mean a court-appointed historian.

4. Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam, 1934), s.v. “historiography.”

5. See Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 468-

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the most well-known of these historians to modern scholars because of his con-tribution to the professionalization of history as founding editor of the American Historical Review, all three of these men were prominent and influential histo-rians in their own time. Like Jameson, Bassett was a member of the “scientific” school of American historical writing, but he has become best known for the role his controversial writing on Southern race relations played in establishing the principle of academic freedom. Barnes, a leading exponent and disseminator of the “New History,” provoked even more controversy with his revisionist interpre-tation of World War I. Despite their influence, Jameson, Bassett, and Barnes have received surprisingly little attention from modern scholars.6

469; Ian Tyrrell, The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), �5�; Robert Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 303; Richard C. Vitzthum, The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 13, n.�, 14, n.5; Michael Kraus and David Joyce, The Writing of American History, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 400-40�; George Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), ��9-�30; Woolf, “Disciplinary History and Historical Discourse,” 3; Linda Orr, “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18 (1986), 1, 10; and Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 4�9-430.

6. For the only scholarly analysis of Bassett as a historian, see Wendell Holmes Stephenson, “John Spencer Bassett: Trinity College Liberal,” and “John Spencer Bassett: Transitional Concept of the Negro,” in Southern History in the Making; Pioneer Historians of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 93-131; and Stephenson, “A Half Century of Southern Historical Scholarship,” Journal of Southern History 11 (1945), 8-1�. On Bassett’s role in the history of academ-ic freedom, see Richard Hofstatdter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 446-451. Although Barnes is frequently mentioned as one of the leading New Historians, modern scholars have paid much more attention to his better-known contemporaries Charles Beard and Carl Becker, and the only book-length study of Barnes is Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action, ed. Arthur Goddard (Colorado Springs, CO: R. Myles, 1968), a collection of articles published as a trib-ute to him. While Cushing Strout, in his The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), �3-�6, and his “The Twentieth Century Enlightenment,” American Political Science Review 49 (1955), 3�6, for example, mentions Barnes’s importance as a disseminator of the New History, he devotes most of his attention to Beard and Becker. Likewise, in his discussion of the Progressive historians, Skotheim, in American Intellectual Histories and Historians, 86, n.�7, mentions Barnes’s importance only in a footnote, and Hofstadter, in Progressive Historians, 3�0, 343-344, makes only two passing references to Barnes. Only Ernst Breisach, in American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), incorporates Barnes into his analysis of the New Historians. On Barnes, see also Justus D. Doenecke, “Harry Elmer Barnes: Prophet of A ‘Usable’ Past,” History Teacher 8 (1975), �65-�76. On Barnes’s influence as a revisionist historian of World War I, see Warren I. cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 60-91. More work has been published on Jameson, but given his role as a leading figure in the professionalization of history, even he has received less scholarly attention than one would expect. The best work on Jameson has been done by Morey D. Rothberg. See his “‘To Set a Standard of Workmanship and Compel Men to Conform to It’: John Franklin Jameson as Editor of the American Historical Review,” American Historical Review 89 (1984), 957-975; Morey Rothberg, “John Franklin Jameson and the International Historical Community,” History Teacher �6 (1993), 449-457; and John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America, Vol. 1: Selected Essays, ed. Morey Rothberg and Jacqueline Goggin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Even scholars writing on historiography have tended to neglect these historians. In his survey of American historical writing, Harvey Wish, The American Historian: A Social-Intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 19, 185, �38, �86, for example, includes only a few passing references to Jameson, Bassett, and Barnes.

ExcEptIoNal HIStory? �03

The neglect of these historians—and more generally of the history and uses of historiography—stems partly from the marginalization of historiography within the profession as a particularly esoteric and narrow subfield that is somehow dif-ferent from “real” historical scholarship—a perception encapsulated by G. R. El-ton’s pronouncement that “[t]here are times when work on the history of history must appear distinctly narcissistic.”7 Elton’s characterization of historiography as “narcissistic” is surprisingly widespread among historians today. I say surprising-ly, for historiography can be seen as narcissistic only by assuming that historians are somehow above or separate from the historical process. If viewed in the same way as other historical subjects, the history of history would not appear narcis-sistic, but would possess the same value as any historical subject as a reflection of and window into its own time.8

Elton’s view of historiography thus reveals a duality in historians’ relationship to the historical process. While the very enterprise of historiography implies some recognition of historians and historical writing as the subjects and products of his-tory, the characterization of historiography as narcissistic reveals the limits to that recognition. This duality is rooted in the early origins and development of histo-riography as a subfield, for the first American practitioners of historiography also demonstrated a certain ambivalence about the relationship between the historian and the historical process. On the one hand, the emergence of historiography as a field of study signified a growing recognition among American historians that their own discipline had a history, and thus was a part and product of the historical process. On the other hand, American historiographers at the same time used their work on this subject to further a scientific ideal of objectivity that was premised on the belief in historians’ ability to place themselves outside of the historical process as disinterested chroniclers of that process.9

By revealing this ambivalence, I challenge Peter Novick’s portrayal of the sci-entific historians as naïve and simplistic positivists defined by their commitment to what he characterizes as the “myth” of objectivity. According to Novick, the ideal of objectivity, although “psychologically and sociologically naïve,” served as a founding myth for the American historical profession by enabling the sci-entific historians to define and legitimize the authority of history as a discipline that required specialized training. Yet this view of the origins of the American historical profession could itself be considered a myth, for the ability of American

7. G. R. Elton, “Review Essay: Clio Unbound,” History and Theory �0 (1981), 9�. On this negative perception of historiography, see Ritter, Dictionary, 191. For exceptions to this neglect, see Woolf, “Disciplinary History and Historical Discourse,” 1-�5; and Orr, “The Revenge of Literature,” 1-��.

8. See also Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 11, for a discussion of and chal-lenge to the tendency to separate the study of history from the study of historiography.

9. On Jameson’s belief in the ideal of objectivity, see Rothberg, “‘To Set a Standard of Workmanship,’” 957-958, 961-966. On Bassett’s commitment to objectivity, see Stephenson, “Half Century of Southern Historical Scholarship,” 9-1�. More generally on Jameson’s and Bassett’s role in disseminating the ideals of scientific history, see Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 400-408. For the view of Barnes as a staunch “antirelativist” who subscribed to a “fanatical faith in objectivity” (��1), see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 179-180, �15-��1. See also Breisach, American Progressive History, 1�7, 161, 165-166, on Barnes’s commitment to objectivity.


historiographers to at once both recognize the subjective character of historical writing through their very interest in historiography and yet affirm a belief in objectivity demonstrates that the early professional historians possessed a more complex understanding of truth than Novick and other modern scholars have ac-knowledged. Moreover, by questioning the myth that the profession was original-ly founded on a naïve faith in the ideal of objective truth, I in turn demonstrate that the New Historians who succeeded the scientific historians were more similar to their predecessors than they (or later scholars) acknowledged. While Novick and other scholars have questioned the newness of the “New History” by revealing the persistence of objectivist assumptions among the New Historians, I show how the New Historians resembled their “scientific” predecessors in both their com-mitment to objectivity and their recognition of the subjective element to historical interpretation.10 Thus, rather than portraying the shift from scientific history to the New History as a linear trajectory of development from objectivity to a more relativist viewpoint, I argue that New Historians like Barnes at once expressed a greater recognition than his scientific predecessors of how historical writing was the product of its context, while still insisting on his commitment to an ideal of objectivity that divorced the historian from that context.

II. J. fraNKlIN JaMESoN aNd tHE profESSIoNalIzatIoN of HIStory: tHE orIgINS of aMErIcaN HIStorIograpHy aNd tHE ENd of ExcEptIoNalISM?

The publication in 1891 of J. Franklin Jameson’s History of Historical Writing in America, the first book-length history of historical writing by an American his-torian, marked an important turning point in the recognition of historical writing

10. For works that perpetuate this critical view of the scientific historians as naïve positivists, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 3-7; W. Stull Holt, “The Idea of Scientific History in America,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940), 35�-36�; Georg Iggers, “The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought,” History and Theory � (196�), 17-�7; Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, 13-�9; Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory, Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, �004), 13-17; and Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, �003), �1-�6. While J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 17-�0, notes that long before Becker, the early professional historians in the United States had already recognized the subjective character of history, he does not delve deeply into the sources of this recognition or its implications for their commitment to the ideal of objectivity. In his History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), 90-91, 101-103, John Higham also notes that the scien-tific historians shared the New Historians’ recognition of the subjective character of history, but he still emphasizes the scientific historians’ greater “confidence in the progressive nature of historical knowledge.” Likewise, Ian Tyrrell challenges the view that the scientific historians were exclusively concerned with objectivity for its own sake, but focuses more on their concern with making history relevant to the general public than on their epistemological assumptions in his Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, �005), �5-�9. Tyrrell gives more attention to these assumptions in his Absent Marx, 16-39, but his main concern here is with the tensions in and limits to the Progressive historians’ theoretical framework. See Susan L. Mizruchi, The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 56-70, for the most sustained and illuminating analysis of the complexities in the scientific historians’ conception of truth and their recognition of the subjective element to historical understanding, but she ultimately focuses on the implications of this recognition for literature in this period. On the persistence of objectivist assumptions among the New Historians, see Novick, That Noble Dream,100-108; Higham, History, 114-116, 1�9-131; Breisach, American Progressive History, 58-60; and Tyrrell, Absent Marx, ��-39.


as a subject and product of history. Jameson went much further than his amateur predecessors in this recognition, but he also revealed its limits as he used his analy-sis of how historical writing was contingent on its context to further an ideal of scientific history premised on the belief that historians could detach themselves from that context and transcend their own subjectivity. This dual understanding of the historian’s relationship to the historical process enabled Jameson not only to legitimize the professionalization of history but also to reconcile a historicist per-spective with the exceptionalist assumptions that had dominated American histori-cal writing up to his time. In its belief that history was moving toward an endpoint outside of history—the realization of America’s special destiny to spread liberty throughout the world—exceptionalist ideology was premised on the assumption that the United States was exempt from the normal processes of historical change and that the real truth of history lay outside of history. While Jameson’s recogni-tion of the contingent character of historical writing enabled him to embrace social history as a vehicle for effecting the transition from this exceptionalist framework to the dissolution of the conditions for American distinctiveness, his belief in the transcendent value of objectivity served to ease the anxieties created by that tran-sition. Ultimately, then, by portraying scientific history as the culmination of the historical process, Jameson sought to demonstrate how American historians could still escape history, even while the nation itself no longer could.11

It was not a coincidence that the first works on historiography were published in the United States at the same time that history was developing into a professional discipline, for the development of historiography into a subfield analyzing the history of historical writing both signified and required a certain self-conscious-ness among historians of history as a distinct field of study; it was only possible to write on the history of history when historians began to see history itself as a separate branch of knowledge—an awareness that was both a cause and effect of professionalization.12 More precisely, the professionalization of history entailed a recognition of history as an autonomous discipline whose study required special-ized training and knowledge, and the establishment of the material and institu-

11. The meaning of the term “historicism” has been sharply contested by scholars, but I follow Dorothy Ross here in using historicism to mean a perspective that locates the meaning of history with-in history, and therefore makes all that happens in history (including the writing of history itself) the product of the historical process. For Ross’s definition of historicism, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xv, 3-6; and Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (1984), 910. Ross in turn draws on Hayden White, “On History and Historicisms,” Introduction, From History to Sociology; the Transition in German Historical Thinking, by Carlo Antoni (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), xv-xxviii, for her definition. On the relationship between historicism and exceptionalist ideology, see Ross, Origins of American Social Science, xiii-xviii, 22-30, �57-300; and Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” 909-�8. On the persistence of exceptionalist assumptions in twentieth-century American historical writing, see Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (1991), 1031-1038. See also David Noble, Historians against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965), for the influence of exceptionalist ideology on American historical writing.

1�. See also Orr, “The Revenge of Literature,” 3, on the close conjunction between the ascen-dancy of German critical scholarship in Europe and the United States and the growth of interest in historiography.


tional basis for that autonomy. On the institutional level, with the transformation from the classical curriculum to the elective system in American colleges during the late nineteenth century, the establishment of history as an academic disci-pline in universities made it possible for historians to make a living through their scholarship as college teachers. Further, with the establishment of history as an academic discipline at the college level, there was now a place where historians could obtain and pass on the kind of special training and knowledge that were deemed necessary for the professional scholar. Especially important in this regard was the creation and transformation of American universities along the model of the research university, which brought with it the institution of the graduate semi-nar—following the German model made famous by Leopold von Ranke—whose purpose was to provide specialized knowledge and training in the techniques of historical research through intensive analysis of primary sources. The clearest sign of the development of history into a profession was the establishment of the American Historical Association in 1884, a national organization of historians that would eventually develop into a professional organization for the discipline, followed by the founding of the American Historical Review in 1895, a journal that was created specifically by and for professional historians.13

As the first student to receive a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University and the first editor of the American Historical Review, Jameson played a leading role in the professionalization of history by using the journal to establish uniform standards of scholarship for the profession and to serve as a forum for the works of professional historians.14 Those standards reflected the ideals of scientific his-tory so integral to professionalization. According to the scientific historians at the turn of the century, history was a science whose goal was supposed to be the disinterested pursuit of objective truth. Scientific history was thus defined by its commitment to the ideal of objectivity, which American historians of this period identified with Leopold von Ranke. Because, according to the Rankean ideal of objectivity, truth was an entity independent of the observer, historians would achieve this goal only if they avoided making any judgments of their own and presented an unbiased account of the facts. The ideal of objectivity served to legitimize the development of history into a profession, for professional histori-

13. On the professionalization of history, see Higham, History, 4-�5; Novick, That Noble Dream, 47-50; and David D. Van Tassel, “From Learned Society to Professional Organization: The American Historical Association, 1884-1900,” American Historical Review 89 (1984), 9�9-956. See Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science [1977] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, �000), 168-177, on the relationship between this development and the professionalization of social science more generally. See also Mary O. Furner, Advocacy & Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University Press of Ken-tucky, 1975), on the professionalization of social science in this period.

14. On Jameson’s importance to the professionalization of history, see Rothberg, “‘To Set a Standard of Workmanship,’” 957-975; and Higham, History, �0-�5. For further background on Jameson, see Rothberg, “Introduction,” in Rothberg and Goggin, eds., John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship, xxvii-liii; American National Biography, s.v. “John Franklin Jameson”; Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “John Franklin Jameson”; and Richard Shrader, “J. Franklin Jameson,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 17: Twentieth-Century American Historians, ed. Clyde Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1983), �30-�35.


ans used this ideal to differentiate their own discipline from its traditional affili-ates—literature and philosophy.15

Trained by Herbert Baxter Adams in the methods of scientific history, Jameson sought through his work on the history of historical writing to further the ideals of scientific history by showing how they represented the culmination of a long process of development. In doing so, Jameson’s History conformed to what Peter Novick has characterized as a “Whig” interpretation of historiography, or what D. R. Woolf has called “‘positivist’ historiography. . . in the looser sense of assuming gradual, incremental progress in the state of historical knowledge and the methods by which such knowledge is obtained.” In this positivist narrative, the develop-ment of historical writing followed a linear process of improvement, culminating with Ranke’s ideal of scientific history. As Woolf has noted, this positivist narrative was not confined to American historians, but also characterized European accounts of historiography, going back to the Swiss historian Eduard Fueter’s survey of European historical writing, published in 1911.16 One of the most influential early surveys of historiography published by a European historian, Fueter’s work was followed two years later by the English historian George Gooch’s History and His-torians in the Nineteenth Century, which took that positivist narrative into the nine-teenth century. Gooch’s and Fueter’s work thus revealed that Jameson’s European contemporaries shared both his interest in historiography and his Whig approach to the subject. Very much attuned to developments in European historical writing, Jameson had in fact published an essay on the history of European historical writ-ing for the Atlantic Monthly the year before publishing the History of Historical Writing, while the reviews of Fueter’s and Gooch’s books published by the Ameri-can Historical Review in 191� and 1913 under Jameson’s editorship suggest that he was aware of their work in historiography. The timing, however, of Jameson’s History reveals that rather than following the lead of his European counterparts, Jameson was in the forefront of the emerging interest in historiography.17

In his History Jameson identified the qualities that defined modern scientific his-tory and revealed his desire to trace its progress when he cited Thomas Prince and William Stith as “the progenitors of modern American historiography.” Because Prince possessed “[t]he wide sweep of the search after materials, the patience

15. On the assumptions of scientific history and its importance to professionalization, see Higham, History, 9�-103; Holt, “The Idea of Scientific History in America,” 5�-6�; and Kraus and Joyce, The Writing of American History, 136-151. I refer to this set of beliefs as the “Rankean” ideal even though as Georg Iggers has demonstrated, this understanding of Ranke was based on a misinterpretation of his views by American historians of this period, because this terminology reflects my own subjects’ usage. See Iggers, “The Image of Ranke,” 17-40; and Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 380-399, on the scientific historians and their misunderstanding of Ranke. On the reciprocal relationship between professionalization and objectivity, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 51-60.

16. On this Whig tendency, see Woolf, “Disciplinary History and Historical Discourse,” �-4; Novick, That Noble Dream, 1�-13; Breisach, Historiography, 4; and Orr, “The Revenge of Literature,” 1-6. The term “Whig” interpretation comes from Herbert Butterfield’s classic The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965).

17. J. Franklin Jameson, “The Development of Modern European Historiography, Atlantic Monthly (September 1890), 3��-333; J. T. Shotwell, “Review of Fueter,” American Historical Review 17 (191�), 81�-813; and J. T. Shotwell, “Review of Gooch,” American Historical Review 19 (1913), 151-153. On Jameson’s interest in and connections to European historical scholarship, see Rothberg, “John Franklin Jameson and the International Historical Community,” 449-457.


and industry in investigation, the minute accuracy and fidelity which character-ize the best of the moderns,” his work was the first American history “of value as a contribution to historical science rather than to historical literature.”18 Even while this assessment was “Whiggish” in measuring Prince and Stith according to their contribution to modern standards of scholarship, Jameson at the same time recognized how such standards were a product of their context in his explanation of their development. Indeed, Jameson’s interest in historiography was premised on his view of historical writing as a historical artifact. For this reason, through-out his analysis Jameson devoted considerable attention to the historical circum-stances and context of the historians he discussed. Far from seeing historians as exempt from the historical process, he characterized them as particularly subject to the influence of their context, declaring that while “[t]he history of every sci-ence is in some degree conditioned by the natural course of things in the world at large . . . this is in a peculiar degree the case with the science of history.” Conse-quently, “[v]iews of the past, and ways of looking at it, change with the changing complexion of the present.”19

Jameson sought through this recognition to further his own agenda for the his-torical profession. Although historical writing did reflect its social context, Jame-son admitted that “the actual march of affairs is far in advance of its expression in literary theory and literary practice.” In this way, the state of historical writ-ing lagged behind current social developments, for, as Jameson explained, “The world changes, but our view of it does not change so fast.” Thus, he suggested, by promoting a more systematic and scientific approach to history, he was simply bringing historical writing into line with contemporary social conditions. More-over, by presenting the shift to scientific history as “the adjustment of the sphere of our historical writing into conformity with the actual facts, relations, and pro-portions of our national existence,” he made this process seem both natural and inevitable.20 So, rather than undercutting Jameson’s belief in objectivity, his rec-ognition of the subjective character of historical writing actually served to further his commitment to that ideal.

Jameson revealed the compatibility between his view of historical writing as a product of history and his faith in the ideal of objectivity when he identified the specific conditions that he believed underwrote the emergence of objective his-tory. Pointing to nationalism as a historical force shaping the writing of American history, Jameson attributed the increasingly scientific and objective character of American historical writing to the development of a more secure sense of nation-ality in the United States. As Jameson explained, now that, with the end of the Civil War, the United States had finally “become a self-reliant nation,” Ameri-can historians “have become more critical and discriminating, have learned more nearly to look upon the course of American history with an impartial eye, from

18. John Franklin Jameson, The History of Historical Writing in America (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1891) http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/800/jameson/jameson.html (accessed May 18, 2006), 71.

19. Ibid., 144.20. Ibid.


the standpoint of an outsider.”21 Equally important, this growing sense of national self-confidence had also contributed to a greater recognition by American histori-ans of the “need of emancipation from the traditions and conventions of European historiography” and the importance of broadening the scope of historical analysis to include social and economic history. Such a departure from the traditional em-phasis on political history would correspond better to American circumstances, for, since “the field of influence of natural conditions upon our national destiny has been peculiarly great,” and that “of great individuals far smaller than in the Old World,” American historians “do not properly reflect the life that they seek to reflect if they write solely of individual persons or groups of persons and their conscious efforts; they must cease blindly to follow European schemes, and study economic and natural conditions and developments, the unintended growth of institutions and modes of life, the unconscious movements and changes of masses of men.” In claiming that such an approach to American history would be truer both to the nation’s unique historical circumstances and to the stage of histori-cal development that the discipline of history had reached in his time, Jameson not only sought to legitimize the study of social and economic history, but also brought together his commitment to exceptionalist assumptions with his recogni-tion that history writing was itself a part of the historical process.22

Specifically, Jameson advocated the study of social history as a way to maintain a belief in the notion of American exceptionalism, while recognizing the threats to that notion. In his emphasis on how America’s “natural conditions” had differ-entiated the nation from Europe, Jameson affirmed his commitment to a key com-ponent of exceptionalist ideology—the belief that America’s closeness to nature had exempted it from the normal processes of historical change.�3 for Jameson, America was exceptional not only by virtue of its social conditions but also by virtue of the historical approach that was necessary for an understanding of those conditions. By differentiating the United States from Europe in this way, Jameson showed the special role of the U.S. while at the same time acknowledging the influence of the historical process on the development of history writing. In this way, much like his contemporary Frederick Jackson Turner did with his famous “frontier thesis,” Jameson sought to reconcile exceptionalist premises with a his-

21. Ibid., 138. On Jameson’s concern with nationalizing both the standards for and content of U.S. history, see Rothberg, “‘To Set a Standard of Workmanship,’” 961-963, 970-975; and Rothberg, “Introduction,” xxxvi-xl. More generally on the nationalist purposes and framework that Jameson shared with other scientific historians, see Ian Tyrrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999), 10�1-10�9.

22. Jameson, History, 141. On Jameson’s interest in social history, see Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, �00�), 18-�7; and Rothberg, “Introduction,” xxix-xxxvi. On how this interest reflected his nationalist per-spective, see Tyrrell, “American Historians in the Context of Empire,” 1030-1031.

�3. See Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” 91�-913; Ross, Origins of American Social Science, especially �5-30; Noble, Historians against History, especially 3-17, 37-55; R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); and Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 55-90, on the exceptionalist assumption that America could escape history through its closeness to nature.


toricist framework; for Jameson, America was exceptional not by virtue of its freedom from history, but by virtue of the nature of its subjugation to history.24

Indeed, Jameson’s explanation for the influence of nature on the nation’s his-torical development was in many ways similar to Turner’s frontier thesis. Like Turner, Jameson believed that the “abundance of Nature” in the United States had insulated the nation from the social and economic inequalities that afflicted Eu-rope. With “the vastness of our national resources solving of itself every problem,” the United States, unlike Europe, had no need of “great administrative statesmen” to come up with “the scientific financial methods” necessary for handling “the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence,” thus diminishing the role of great individuals in the nation’s history.25 Believing, like Turner, that the nation had been defined by the existence of “a vast area of unoccupied and fertile land” in the West, Jameson attributed the nation’s spirit of individualism and self-reli-ance to the constant presence of “a frontier (until lately), a borderland between civilization and the wilderness,” for the challenges of frontier life had resulted in “a special variety of manhood, independent, resolute, active, full of resources, self-reliant, unmindful of precedents, buoyant and hopeful.”26

Through the frontier thesis, both Turner and Jameson reconciled exceptionalist assumptions with a historicist framework by grounding the nation’s uniqueness in concrete historical conditions rather than in a divine plan. Yet the frontier thesis also implied that America could not remain in this exceptional state indefinitely when the nation ran out of free land. Significantly, Jameson issued his call for American historians to break free of European models just two years before Turner presented his famous essay declaring that the frontier was closed. If, according to Turner, the frontier accounted for America’s exceptional character as a democratic nation, and if the frontier was now closed, then that would mean that the United States would now be subject to the same historical forces as other nations and could no longer claim to be exceptional. While Jameson did not mention this possibility in his His-tory of Historical Writing, he directly confronted it in a paper titled “The Future Uses of History,” first presented in 191�. As he did so, he revealed both the extent of and limits to his recognition of historical writing as the product of history. Al-though “[h]itherto free land has been our basis,” Jameson proclaimed in this essay, “The era of free land is over,” and, as a result, “we have ceased, almost suddenly ceased, to be a new country . . . and have become an old country.”27

�4. On Jameson’s commitment to exceptionalist assumptions and his similarities to Turner, see Tyrrell, “American Historians in the Context of Empire,” 10�8, 1036. On Jameson’s desire to dif-ferentiate the United States from Europe through social history, see Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 27-28. See ross, Origins of American Social Science, �67-�70, on how, like Turner, Jameson’s his-toricism contributed to his interest in social and economic history. On how, unlike Jameson, American historians had sought to escape from the complexity of history by differentiating the United States from Europe, see Noble, Historians against History, 1-36.

25. Jameson, History, 139-140.�6. Jameson, “The Revolution as a Social Movement,” in Rothberg and Goggin, eds., John

Franklin Jameson, �19-��0. On Jameson’s attachment to Turner’s frontier thesis, see Rothberg, “John Franklin Jameson and the International Historical Community,” 451.

�7. J. Franklin Jameson, “The Future Uses of History,” American Historical Review 65 (1959), 68, 69. On how Turner sought through his frontier thesis to reconcile his commitment to American exceptionalism with his historicism, see Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 270-274. on the tensions in Turner’s view of America’s relationship to history, see David Noble, The End of


Such a transformation not only entailed for Jameson a dramatic change in American society and politics, but also called for a change in the nature of histori-cal writing. Viewing the end of American exceptionalism as part of a larger trend in which international structures were supplanting the nation as a primary mode of human organization, Jameson demanded, “Can it be supposed that so great and so dramatic a transition . . . shall have no effect upon the questions which men ask concerning the past?” In a “new world” “marked by cosmopolitan thought and sentiment” and “by institutions increasingly internationalized,” Jameson believed that “[s]ocial and economic history will surely assume a greater place than politi-cal history.” For Jameson, then, social history was the mode of historical writing that would at once best capture and embody American’s distinctiveness from Eu-rope in the past, and best suit the dissolution of such national distinctions by the internationalizing tendencies of the future.28

In this way, Jameson used his recognition of the contingent character of his-torical writing to reconcile his belief in American exceptionalism with both his understanding of how the conditions for that exceptionalism were vanishing and his cosmopolitan vision of a “socialized and internationalized Christendom.” If the United States was no longer distinct from Europe, Jameson believed, its his-torians could still maintain their sense of national distinctiveness through both the content and approach of their historical writing; not only would they record the memory of a time when America had been exceptional, but in doing so through social and economic history, they would themselves embody and retain an ele-ment of American exceptionalism in the present. Not only did such an approach depart from traditional European models of historical writing, but in predicting that Europe would also embrace social history in the future, Jameson subscribed to a variant of the exceptionalist view of the United States as a model and a beacon for the rest of the world to follow. If, according to Jameson, the United States was becoming more like Europe in its actual social development, then Europe would become more like the United States in its approach to writing about the history of that development. Rather than being mutually exclusive, then, Jameson’s commit-ment to exceptionalist ideology was integrally related to his internationalism.�9

However, though Jameson thought the scope and subject matter of history would change as social conditions became increasingly cosmopolitan, he did not believe that historical methodology would. Hence, Jameson’s predictions for

American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 18-�7; and Noble, Historians against History, 37-55. For further discussion of Turner, see Breisach, American Progressive History, �1-�8; and Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, 47-164.

�8. Jameson, “Future Uses of History,” 69, 68, 70. On how this essay revealed Jameson’s trans-national perspective, see Tyrrell, “American Historians in the Context of Empire,” 1031. On how Jameson’s belief in the closing of the frontier contributed to his internationalism, see Rothberg, “Jameson and the International Historical Community,” 451.

�9. Jameson, “Future Uses of History,” 70. On how Jameson, like other scientific historians, brought together a nationalist perspective with a transnational approach, see Tyrrell, “American Historians in the Context of Empire,” 1016-1018, 1031. More generally on the close relationship between American exceptionalism and internationalism, see Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism,” 105�-1053. See also Breisach, American Progressive History, 8, on the universalist aspects of excep-tionalist ideology.


future changes in the discipline of history did not include the possibility of de-partures from scientific history. Indeed, when he claimed that “the independent value” of history “as a discipline will surely never cease,” citing the “severity of its methods, its merciless sifting and dissection, and comparison of human state-ments,” as well as its role as “one of the principal promoters of fairness of mind,” as qualities that would permanently endure, he implied his belief in the lasting value and existence of scientific history, for these qualities were all associated with the ideal of objectivity.30 By making the ideal of objectivity the culmination of the historical process, Jameson at once reconciled his view of historical writ-ing as a historical product with his commitment to this ideal, but he also revealed the limits to that reconciliation. If for Jameson scientific history had developed as a result of a historical process, it also possessed a value that transcended that process and made it immune to future historical changes. In this way, he suggest-ed, if America itself was not exempt from the processes of history, its historians were—at least with respect to its epistemic ideals and methodologies. Thus, if for Jameson a more secure sense of nationality had contributed to the development of the ideal of objectivity in the United States, that ideal now assuaged the decline of nationalism as a historical force and the loss of America’s exceptional status by offering the sense of permanence and exemption from history that exceptionalist ideology had once provided to American society.31

III. ScIENtIfIc HIStory IN tHE SoUtH: JoHN SpENcEr baSSEtt aNd tHE problEM of popUlar appEal

Yet, as John Spencer Bassett recognized in his Middle Group of American Histo-rians, published in 1917, the benefits of scientific history had come at a cost, for professional historians had sacrificed popular appeal in favor of objectivity. Shar-ing Jameson’s firm commitment to scientific history, Bassett wished to use histo-riography to reconcile his concern with establishing the professional authority of historians with his desire for popular success. As he sought to illuminate the causes and consequences of popular disaffection from professional history, Bassett repre-sented historical writing as itself a product of history. In doing so, he expressed his ambivalence about the democratization of American intellectual life, and revealed how this ambivalence intersected with sectional imperatives. Both his desire to appeal to general audiences and his doubts about the feasibility of this goal were rooted in his concerns about the cultural and social backwardness of the South. In this way Bassett, like Jameson, used historiography to express and resolve broader anxieties about the nation’s progress. But whereas Jameson feared that progress had overtaken America’s status as an exceptional nation, Bassett was concerned about how to bring the South up to that level of progress.

Bassett’s use of historiography to validate the status of history as a profession was partly a function of his background and training as a historian. Like Jameson,

30. Jameson, “Future Uses of History,” 6�.31. On how the ideal of objectivity at once repudiated any resort to transcendent and unchanging

forces as a mode of historical explanation, and itself served as a source of permanence and stability for American historians, see Breisach, American Progressive History, 15-20.


Bassett had studied under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, and was as a result firmly committed to the ideals of scientific history. But his concerns were unlike those of Jameson: reflecting his own Southern background, Bassett sought both to apply these ideals to the study of Southern history and to disseminate them to the South as a teacher at Trinity College (later Duke University) in North Carolina. Bassett furthered this goal through his scholarship on Southern history and his work in collecting primary documents for the Trinity College Historical Society.3� At the same time, as Ian Tyrrell has demonstrated, contrary to their reputation as exponents of an arcane ideal of historical scholarship interested only in truth for its own sake, Bassett and other scientific historians were concerned with making their work accessible to the general public and relevant to contem-porary social problems. In their concern with reaching general readers, scientific historians were responding in part to the nationalization of publishing and cultural production after the Civil War, which enlarged the market for history by contrib-uting to the rise of a “middlebrow culture” whose aim was to popularize elite or “high” culture. This development brought professional historians both greater opportunities for reaching general readers and greater competition for those read-ers, as the expanding audience for history stimulated the growth of nonacademic historical writing by historical novelists and journalists.33 Bassett’s concern with reaching the general public and his desire for social relevance were also partly a function of sectional imperatives, as he revealed in his work as editor and founder of the South Atlantic Quarterly, a journal directed broadly at “serious minded” Southerners, whose purpose was to promote independent thinking and challenge what Bassett saw as the intellectual and political backwardness of the South.34

Bassett brought together his concern with popular appeal with his desire to establish the professional authority of history as a scientific discipline commit-ted to the ideal of objectivity in his Middle Group of American Historians. al-though Bassett focused more narrowly than Jameson on early to mid-nineteenth century American historians, he preceded his discussion of these historians with a broad overview of American historical writing before this period. Bassett pointed

3�. On Bassett’s commitment to scientific history, see Stephenson, “Half-Century,” 9-1�. For further background on Bassett, see Stephenson, “John Spencer Bassett: Trinity College Liberal,” and “John Spencer Bassett: Transitional Concept of the Negro,” 93-131; Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “John Spencer Bassett”; and Herbert Doherty, “John Spencer Bassett,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, XVII, �6-3�.

33. On the efforts of early twentieth-century professional historians to reach general audiences, see tyrrell, Historians in Public, 44-61. See also Deborah L. Haines, “Scientific History as a Teaching Method: the formative years,” Journal of American History 63 (1977), 907, 901-908, 911-91�, on the scientific historians’ concern with the social relevance of history; and John Higham, “Herbert Baxter Adams and the Study of Local History,” American Historical Review 89 (1984), 1��5-1�39, on Adams’s efforts to coordinate and bring together amateur and professional historians. See Higham, History, 73-8�, on how the emergence of a new “middlebrow” audience contributed to the revival of general interest in history after World War I, though Higham differs from Tyrrell in emphasizing professional historians’ lack of interest in reaching that audience. On the rise of middlebrow cul-ture, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 199�).

34. Quoted in Stephenson, “Trinity College Liberal,” 103. On Bassett’s concern with promot-ing social reform in the South, see Stephenson, “Trinity College Liberal,” 101-106; Doherty, “John Spencer Bassett,” 4; and William E. King, “John Spencer Bassett,” http://www.lib.duke.edu/archives/history/j_s_bassett.html (accessed March 17, �007).


to the direct influence of Jameson on his own work in historiography by citing Jameson’s history of historical writing in the footnotes to his Middle Group. Like Jameson, Bassett repeatedly measured his predecessors against the scientific ideal of objectivity, praising historians for contributing to this ideal and criticizing them when they failed to live up to it. For example, Bassett was especially critical of George Bancroft for the partisanship and nationalistic bias of his historical work, citing “the lack of detachment” as “[t]he weightiest charge against Bancroft.” As Bassett explained, Bancroft was “deeply imbued with the love of American independence,” and like his contemporaries “crystallized all the hero worship of the old Fourth-of-July school” by glorifying the revolutionaries and vilifying the British. As a result, while highly acclaimed in his own time, “Bancroft’s History is now out of date, and a changing age treats it with disdain.”35 In noting the repudiation of Bancroft by the present generation of historians, Bassett pointed to the ascendancy of the scientific ideal of objectivity in his own time over the Romantic and nationalistic history identified with Bancroft. Like Jameson, Bas-sett thus structured his analysis into a positivist narrative of historiography that presented the history of historical writing in the United States as a story of gradual progress culminating in the establishment of scientific history. For Bassett, the end of the “middle period” in American historical writing “lies where the scien-tific spirit secures domination over the patriotic school that had ruled for several decades,” with “the organization of the American Historical Association in 1884” as possibly “a convenient date” to mark this dividing line.36 Through this “Whig” interpretation of American historiography, Bassett, again like Jameson, sought to legitimize the development of history into a professional discipline.

At the same time, however, Bassett was deeply ambivalent about this develop-ment, for he recognized the costs to what he viewed as the progress of the histori-cal discipline. Hence, for all his commitment to factual accuracy and “scientific” objectivity, Bassett spoke admiringly of the literary artistry of Romantic histori-ans like William H. Prescott and John Lothrop Motley. While acknowledging that their concern with dramatizing history and making it come to life detracted from the scientific character of their works, Bassett expressed “admiration for their careful mastery of the arts of narration. No living man of the new school has won, or is likely to win, as much success as they won in their day. We could not go back to their school—that would be retrogressing; but if we could only bring forward their best qualities into our own group of scholarly and conscientious workers, the results would be well worth the effort.” Although, as he made clear in repudiating a return to the Romantic school of historical writing, Bassett firmly believed in the superiority of scientific history, he at the same time here expressed a certain nostalgia for the kind of artistry and popular success that the literary historians had been able to achieve.37

Not only was such popular success important for its own sake, but, as Bassett recognized, it would also provide historians with a source of financial support

35. John Spencer Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians (New York: Macmillan Co., 1917), 183-184.

36. Ibid., ix.37. Ibid., �31-�3�.


that would free them from the need to teach. Precisely because of their failure to achieve this kind of success, Bassett argued, professional historians in his own time could support themselves only by teaching. Citing Jared Sparks as “an early instance of the union, so common in our own day, of the functions of historian and history teacher in one man,” Bassett attributed this practice “to the difficulty a man finds in making a living out of history alone.” The problem with this solution, according to Bassett, was that the qualities necessary for good teaching and those necessary for good historical scholarship were mutually exclusive. Arguing that teaching and historical scholarship “require such distinct qualities of mind that it is rare to find them in the possession of one person,” Bassett concluded that the current system of academic history, “is not an ideal system,” for “the guarantee of the best teaching and the best writing” would be to “[l]et him teach who can best teach, and let him write who can best write.” Bassett thus used his analysis of historiography to critique a system that made college teaching the primary source of support for professional historians.38

This critique was partly a product of Bassett’s own struggles to balance the de-mands of a heavy teaching load at Trinity with his scholarly pursuits, and he would leave Trinity for Smith College in 1906 so that he would have more time for his own research. More fundamentally, Bassett’s decision to leave Trinity revealed his growing pessimism about the intellectual capacities of ordinary people in the South, which was in turn a product of the outraged popular response to his efforts at racial reform.39 Although by no means egalitarian in his racial views, Bassett criticized white violence against African-Americans, urging Southern whites to adopt a more conciliatory approach to race relations. Hence he praised Booker T. Washington as “the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hun-dred years” in his article “Stirring Up the Fires of Race Antipathy,” published for the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1903. This attack on racial bigotry stirred such a popular outcry that it led to widespread calls for his dismissal. In what would be-come a landmark case in the development of the principle of academic freedom, Trinity refused to accept Bassett’s resignation. The angry reaction to his article, however, made Bassett increasingly doubtful about whether Southern audiences were too culturally backward for him to achieve his goal of making scientific his-tory accessible and relevant to the general public.40 Bassett expressed such doubts when he remarked in a letter to William Boyd “that it is very well in the South to be an antiquarian but difficult to be a historian in a cosmopolitan sense. It is easy to do the work of popular ‘arousement,’ but not that of mature and scholarly think-

38. Ibid., 1�8-1�9.39. On the reasons for Bassett’s decision to leave Trinity, see Doherty, “John Spencer Bassett,” 5;

Stephenson, “Trinity College Liberal,” 115-117; and Stephenson, “Transitional Concept,” 131.40. John Spencer Bassett, “Stirring Up the Fires of Race Antipathy,” in Fifty Years of the South

Atlantic Quarterly, ed. William B. Hamilton (Durham: Duke University Press, 195�), 55. On Bassett’s racial views and the reaction to this article, see Stephenson, “Transitional Concept,” 1�6-130; “The Bassett Affair,” http://www.lib.duke.edu/archives/history/j_s_bassett.html (accessed March 17, �007); Doherty, “John Spencer Bassett,” 4-5; Hofstatdter, Academic Freedom, 446-451; William B. Hamilton, “Fifty Years of Liberalism and Learning,” in Fifty Years of the South Atlantic Quarterly, 5-9; and David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, �001), �95-�96. On the obstacles to the popularization of academic history in the South, see Tyrrell, Historians in Public, �1�-�13.


ing. All the impulse to stir up something leads to a stage of achievement which a cultured community ought to have passed a generation ago.”41

Bassett took these doubts about whether popular audiences could handle the objectivity of scientific history and generalized them beyond the South when he explained why it was impossible for scientific historians in his own time to achieve the popular success of the Romantic historians. Viewing the present as a “transitional stage” when “American education, universal though it be, has not yet resulted in an average man who is capable of balanced thought on important historical matters,” Bassett predicted that it would not be until future generations that the historian would have “the happy fortune of knowing that his detached history will find a just appreciation from a detached public.”42 on the other side, Bassett believed that the failure of his scientific contemporaries to achieve the popular appeal of their Romantic predecessors was also a function of changes in the class origins of historians themselves. As Bassett explained in an essay, “The Present State of History-Writing,” published in 19�6, because the “old historian was a man of leisure,” not only did he have the time and the means to work on his literary artistry, but he was also more likely to possess an “aesthetic sense” in the first place by virtue of his social background. This quality, he remarked, “is more apt to be found” in “the upper classes of society” than in “the class that is accus-tomed to the plainer ways and thinking of the world.”43 According to Bassett, an aesthetic sense and literary artistry no longer characterized historical writing in his own time precisely because professional historians now came predominantly from the latter class. And so, for Bassett, while the “democratic way of selecting our teachers and writers” “has given us sound and industrious scholarship,” these scholars needed more training “in the art of saying things well,” for “[l]eft alone they are apt to fall into the dull and dreary habits of amassing information without grace of form and without charm of expression.”44

Ironically, then, for Bassett, the democratization of the profession had made historical scholarship itself more exclusionary and undemocratic in its lack of ap-peal to ordinary readers. In his analysis of how economic factors such as class had shaped the writing of history, Bassett in his own way represented historical writ-ing as a product of the historical process. By using this recognition to demonstrate why it was more difficult for historians in his own time to support themselves through their writing, Bassett used a historicist view of historical writing to ex-press both his uncertainties about the effects of professionalization and his ambiv-alence about democratization more generally. Although Bassett was democratic in his desire to reach popular audiences, he at the same time revealed an elite bias both in attributing “dull and dreary habits of amassing information” to historians who came from outside the elite, and in claiming that the “average man” in his time was not “capable of balanced thought” about history. So, even while profes-

41. Quoted in Stephenson, “Transitional Concept,” 131.42. bassett, Middle Group, �30.43. John Spencer Bassett, “The Present State of Historical Writing,” in Jean J. Jusserand et al., The

Writing of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 19�6), 116-117. On this report, see Tyrrell, Historians in Public, 44.

44. Bassett, “Present State of Historical Writing,” 118-119.


sionalization was itself part of an effort to uphold elite authority over the masses, Bassett here expressed his concern that professionalization had actually weakened that authority by at once alienating professional historians from the people and al-lowing too many of the people into the ranks of professional historians.45

As he made explicit in the opening and closing sections of his Middle Group, Bassett ultimately sought through his study of antebellum historians to make his colleagues recognize and take seriously the lack of popular interest in history as a problem for the profession. While he could not offer a clear-cut solution to this problem, Bassett expressed his hope that, through its analysis of antebellum historians, his book could at least give historians and their supporters “more con-fidence in the historian’s profession.”46 In declaring that his goal was to promote greater “confidence” in the profession, Bassett suggested that he was using liter-ary historians as models that could inspire contemporary historians with a desire to make their works accessible to the public and a faith in their ability to do so. By bringing together the objectivity of scientific history with the literary artistry and popular appeal of the Romantic historians, Bassett implied, professional his-torians could support themselves without having to turn to teaching to make a living. Contrary to Linda Orr’s analysis of how historiography has emphasized the “epistemological break” between history and literature as a way to dissociate literature from history, then, Bassett pointed to that break in order to reconcile the two genres and bring literature back into the writing of history.47

IV. tHE old aNd tHE NEW IN tHE “NEW HIStory” of Harry ElMEr barNES: pEacE, progrESS, aNd tHE rEpUdIatIoN of NatIoNalISM

In their concern with making history more accessible to the public, scientific his-torians like Bassett were reacting not just to what they perceived as the decline of popular interest in history, but also to the criticisms of the “New History,” which attacked scientific history for its failure to understand or convey the contemporary relevance of history.48 Yet the New Historians were more similar to their scientific predecessors than they acknowledged, both in their concern with making history relevant to the general public and in their interest in historiography.49 the New

45. On Bassett’s misgivings about the increasingly plebeian class background of professional historians, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 171-17�. On how the elite’s desire to uphold its authority contributed to the professionalization of history, and the changing social backgrounds of professional historians in the early twentieth century, see Higham, History, 8-15, 63-65. See also Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science, 63-90, on how this concern with authority contributed more generally to the professionalization of social science.

46. bassett, Middle Group, vii-viii.47. Orr, “The Revenge of Literature,” 1-3. Likewise, Van Tassel, “From Learned Society to

Professional Organization,” 17�-173, and Higham, History, 97, emphasize the scientific historians’ desire to differentiate themselves from the “literary historians.” Haines challenges this portrayal of the scientific historians by pointing to their concern with literary artistry (“Scientific History as a Teaching Method,” 907-908).

48. Modern scholars have variously referred to this school as the Progressive Historians and as the New Historians. Since Barnes identified himself so wholeheartedly as a “New Historian,” I will use this term to refer to this group of historians. On the usage of these terms, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 9�, n.1�.

49. On this shared concern with reaching the general public, see Tyrrell, Historians in Public, 44-61.


Historians had already begun their attack on the scientific historians with the publi-cation of James Harvey Robinson’s The New History in 191�. Part of what Morton White has termed the “revolt against formalism,” New Historians like Robinson repudiated abstract and, in their eyes, artificial systems of thought in favor of a perspective that emphasized the seamlessness and interconnectedness of human affairs and thus gave primacy to history and experience as the basis for knowledge. For antiformalists, nothing could be understood apart from its context, and that context itself was always subject to change, enmeshed as it was in a complex series of connections across space and time. Therefore, according to the New Historians, each generation writes its own history, for the writing of history was itself contin-gent on its context. Consequently, the task for historians was to adapt their work so that it would best reflect the needs and concerns of the present.50

In their emphasis on the contingent character of historical interpretations, the New Historians revealed their understanding that historical writing was a product of the historical process, and in this way contributed directly to the recognition that historical writing—and historians—are historical subjects. Hence, many of the New Historians took a special interest in historiography. Robinson himself had in-cluded an essay on “The History of History” in his book The New History, and carl Becker expressed what would become an abiding interest in the topic in his essay “Some Aspects of the Influence of Social Problems and Ideas upon the Study and Writing of History” (1913).51 Another of the New Historians, James Shotwell, took this interest even further, publishing in 19�� a book-length survey of ancient his-torical writing. Paradoxically, then, even while seeking to break free from the ideas of earlier historians, the New Historians contributed to an interest in studying those historians.52 Their interest in historiography came to fruition in the 1930s, with the publication of Harry Elmer Barnes’s A History of Historical Writing (1937); the Marcus Jernegan Essays in American Historiography (1937), edited by William Hutchinson; and Michael Kraus’s A History of American History (1938).

50. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism [1947] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 3-31, 47-58. On the importance of interdependence to antiformalism, and on how a growing recognition of interdependence began to develop in the 1890s, see Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science, 14-17, �4-47. On the basic assumptions of the New Historians, see Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, �1-�9; Higham, History, 104-116; Charles Crowe, “The Emergence of Progressive History,” Journal of the History of Ideas �7 (1966), 109-1�4; and Breisach, American Progressive History.

51. Although Becker’s uncertainty about progress and his reluctance to engage in social activism set him apart from the New Historians, I include Becker here among the New Historians because he shared their repudiation of scientific history. For differing views of Becker’s uneasy relationship to the New History, see Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 90-91, 186-189; Charlotte Watkins Smith, Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 115-1�0; Higham, History, 1�0-1�3; Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, 45; and Milton M. Klein, “Progressive History’s Curmudgeon: The Enigmatic Carl Becker,” Reviews in American History � (1974), �94. On Becker’s interest in historiography, see Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians, 119-1�1; Smith, Carl Becker, 210-212.

5�. On the contribution of Barnes and other New Historians such as Becker and Beard to the concept of historiography as a field of study, see Ritter, Dictionary, 190-191. More generally on the use of historiography as a “critical weapon” by historians wishing to challenge traditional views of the past, see Higham, History, 89.


Although Barnes set himself in opposition to scientific historians like Bassett and Jameson, he actually shared their ambivalence about the historian’s relation-ship to both the historical process and the general public, and he brought together these concerns in his work on historiography. The source of that ambivalence dif-fered for Barnes, however. Whereas Jameson’s lingering commitment to American exceptionalism both contributed to and limited his historicism, Barnes’s ambiva-lence about the historian’s relationship to the historical process was a function of his desire to repudiate this kind of national chauvinism. More specifically, even while Barnes embraced a relativistic understanding of truth that went further than Bassett and Jameson in its recognition of historians as the product of their context, his desire to combat nationalism limited that recognition in two ways. First, in using historiography to demonstrate how nationalism had obstructed historical truth, he expressed a faith in objectivity at odds with his relativism. Second, in privileging social and cultural history as an antidote to nationalism throughout his historiog-raphy, he revealed his unwillingness to acknowledge that his interest in social and cultural history was itself contingent on its context. So, while like other New Histo-rians, Barnes’s desire to make history an instrument of social reform was predicated on a historicist understanding of historical writing as a reflection of its context, his efforts to carry out that purpose revealed the limits to this understanding.53

Although less well-known today than fellow New Historian James Harvey Rob-inson, Barnes was, together with Robinson, a leading figure in promulgating the New History in his own time. While doing his graduate work at Columbia, Barnes had studied under Robinson as well as under another of the New Historians, James Shotwell, who, through both his Introduction to the History of History and the course he taught on historiography, contributed to Barnes’s interest in the subject.54 A prolific scholar who wrote on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from intellec-tual and diplomatic history to criminology, Barnes was something of an intellectual nomad, moving through a series of academic posts at such institutions as the New School and Smith College, and alternating between the academic realm and his work in journalism as a frequent contributor to periodicals like the New Republic and the American Mercury. Barnes established his reputation as a leading revision-ist interpreter of World War I in a 19�4 article for the New Republic, stirring sharp controversy with his attack on the belief that Germany was responsible for the war. Like many others of the New Historians, originally a fervent supporter of Ameri-can intervention, Barnes reversed his view of the war out of disillusionment with the settlement established by the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of the war to effect the democratic ideals that Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed as its goal.55 as

53. On how Barnes’s contemporary Charles Beard’s activist purposes were also predicated on a faith in objectivity at odds with his relativism, and on the relationship between the New Historians’ repudiation of exceptionalist doctrines and the development of historicism, see Breisach, American Progressive History, 171-177.

54. On Barnes’s importance to the New History, see Merle Curti, “Harry Elmer Barnes as an Historical Critic,” in Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, 353. For Shotwell’s influence on Barnes, see Curti, 355; and Stanton Ling Davis, “History and Historiography,” in Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, 182.

55. On Barnes’s revisionism, see Cohen, The American Revisionists, 60-91; Novick, That Noble Dream, �08-��3; and William Neumann, “Harry Elmer Barnes as World War I Revisionist,” in goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, �61-�87. For further background on Barnes and his social


part of his reaction against the massive destruction brought about by the war and the patriotic excesses it instigated, Barnes turned against nationalism itself, ulti-mately attributing the war to its influence. Hence, Barnes sought through both his revisionist account of World War I and his work in historiography to combat what he saw as the dangers of nationalism in the present.56

The very scope and structure of Barnes’s History of Historical Writing reflect-ed his desire to transcend national boundaries, for, unlike Jameson and Bassett, Barnes did not confine his analysis to American historians, and instead sought to provide a broad overview of the history of historical writing in general. While most of his analysis focused on historical writing in Western Europe and the United States, he did give at least some attention to historical writing from other regions. When he did discuss developments in American historical writing, he repudiated an exceptionalist framework and examined such developments from a transnational perspective, as when he pointed to the influence of European histo-rians on the development of historiography itself as a historical subject. Thus in his analysis of “the history of the history of history,” Barnes singled out for praise Fueter’s History of Modern Historiography (1911), Gooch’s History and Histori-ans in the Nineteenth Century (1913), and the Scottish historian John B. Black’s study of Enlightenment historical writing, The Art of History (19�6).57

While Barnes also acknowledged the contribution of Jameson and Bassett to the development of historiography, even citing Jameson’s study of American his-torical writing as “an excellent introduction” to the subject, he was far more criti-cal of the ideal of scientific history advanced by their historiographical works.58 In his sharp attack on the scientific historians’ commitment to the ideal of objectivity, he went much further than Jameson or Bassett in recognizing that it was impos-sible for historians to escape the influence of their context and divest themselves completely of their prejudices. Since, according to Barnes, “no truly excellent piece of intellectual work can be executed without real interest and firm convic-tions,” the scientific historians were completely wrongheaded in their assumption that truth was simply a matter of accumulating facts. As Barnes explained, this be-lief was premised on what he considered “[t]he naïve assumption” and “illusion of the simple-minded and the inadequately informed” that facts were “concrete and integral entities . . . lying about” in historical documents waiting to be discovered by the historian. Instead, because Barnes believed that historical facts could never be understood apart from their context, the so-called discovery of a historical fact really meant “only that we have acquired information which allows us to make a

purposes, see Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes; Doenecke, “Harry Elmer Barnes,” �65-�76; and American National Biography, s.v. “Harry Elmer barnes.”

56. On how Barnes shared with most of the other New Historians a critical view of nationalism as an obstacle to progress, see Breisach, American Progressive History, 143-144, 148-149. On how World War I at once undermined and contributed to the persistence of a transnational perspective in this period, see Tyrrell, “American Historians in the Context of Empire,” 1017, 1035-1037.

57. Harry Elmer barnes, A History of Historical Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937), 401. On the growing tendency by American historians in this period to recognize the intercon-nections between the United States and Europe, see Leonard Krieger, “European History in America,” in Higham, History, �68-�87. On the persistence of transnational perspectives in this period, see Tyrrell, “American Historians in the Context of Empire,” 1017, 1034-1035.

58. barnes, History, 402.


highly subjective and incomplete reconstruction of one or more of the elements which once existed in a now extinct historical situation.” In his claims for the subjective character of fact, and his belief that facts had to be viewed as part of a complex web of circumstances rather than as discrete entities, Barnes sounded much like Becker in his essays “What are Historical Facts” and “Detachment and the Writing of History;” indeed, Barnes specifically cited Becker’s “What are Historical Facts” for his definition of “fact.”59

The first of the New Historians to challenge the ideal of objectivity, Becker also went further than most of the other New Historians in his relativism. Notorious for his ambivalence and ambiguity on the subject, Becker was himself wary of using the label “relativist” to describe his views on historical truth. But if relativism is defined to mean the view that, because historical interpretations are always a func-tion of their context, there can be no absolute or universal standard of truth, then Becker could be considered a relativist.60 Hence, while Becker acknowledged the existence of an objective reality, he not only believed that it was impossible for historians to transcend their own subjectivity and directly access that reality, he also questioned the validity of objectivity as an ideal.

Like Becker, Barnes believed that just as facts were subjective entities, the writing of history was, by definition, an interpretive—and hence subjective—en-terprise.61 Consequently, Barnes maintained “that absolute historical truth is a complete fiction, and that at best we can only hope for approximations that are partly the result of accurate research, partly the result of lucky accidents of inter-pretation, and partly the product of special ingenuity and subtlety on the part of a particular historian.” Not only was absolute truth unattainable for Barnes, but in his claim that this concept was a “complete fiction,” Barnes, like Becker, also seemed to reject the ideal of objectivity itself as illusory.62

59. Barnes, History, 266, 267-268. See Smith, Carl Becker, 70, 77; and Wilkins, Carl Becker, 201, on Barnes’s enthusiastic response to this paper. On Becker’s conception of fact, see Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, 33-35; and Smith, Carl Becker, 51-77.

60. On Becker’s ambivalence about the label “relativist,” and the inconsistencies and ambiguities in his statements of his relativism, see Milton M. Klein, “Everyman His Own Historian: Carl Becker as Historiographer,” History Teacher 19 (1985), 101-109, especially 103; and Smith, Carl Becker, especially 97-99. Smith (87, 107), however, discerns an essential consistency in Becker’s relativism despite the apparent inconsistency of his rhetoric, in contrast to Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, �6-49, 83-85; Wilkins, Carl Becker, 189; and Tyrrell, The Absent Marx, 36-38, who place greater emphasis on the contradictions in Becker’s views on historical truth. For works that place Becker at the fore-front of relativism, see Higham, History, 1�0-1�3; Breisach, American Progressive History, 53-54; and Novick, That Noble Dream, 105-107. On the relativist denial of absolute standards of truth, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 166-167, �63.

61. On Becker’s critique of scientific history and its conception of objectivity, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 103-107; Smith, Carl Becker, 50-87; Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, 3�-41; and Breisach, American Progressive History, 53-60.

62. barnes, History, 271. While Smith, Carl Becker, 70, 77, 118, notes Barnes’s enthusiastic endorsement of Becker’s relativism, and even suggests that Barnes went further than Becker in his relativism, other scholars of Barnes seem to have missed this endorsement in characterizing him as a staunch proponent of objectivity. See Novick, That Noble Dream, 179-180, �15-��1; and Breisach, American Progressive History, 1�7, 130, 161-16�, 165-166, �33. Curti points to Barnes’s belief that historical relativism was a “veritable truism,” in his “Historical Critic,” 350, but does not really delve into the content of Barnes’s relativism. Likewise, Davis, “History and Historiography,” 186, 19�, only briefly notes that Barnes shared Becker’s belief in the subjective character of fact and his critique of the scientific historians.


Yet, as Peter Novick argues, Becker and other American relativists of his time did not repudiate “the existence or knowability of truth” altogether, but instead emphasized the “plurality of criteria” for determining what is true.63 Because they maintained a belief in the existence of standards of truth—however varied and contingent they were—their relativism did not preclude the possibility of error or falsehood when those standards were violated.64 Barnes revealed his allegiance to this understanding of relativism when he asserted that “accurate research” could contribute to “approximations” of the truth, for he would not have been able to speak of accuracy or “approximations” of the truth if he denied the knowability or existence of truth entirely. Barnes’s commitment to “accurate research” implied his belief in the existence of a body of verifiable knowledge by which to measure accuracy, while his hope for “approximations” of the truth presumed that there was a historical truth to be approximated.65

Because of his relativism Barnes recognized to an even greater extent than Jameson or Bassett that historical writing was itself a product of its context. Barnes criticized the neglect of historiography by earlier historians as evidence of a “strangely non-historical attitude towards their own subject” precisely because of his assumption that “[h]istorical writing, like other forms of culture, is truly a historical product.” So when he claimed that “a history of historical writing must necessarily be, to a large degree, a phase of the intellectual history of mankind,” Barnes went even further than Jameson and Bassett in historicizing this topic. In equating historiography with intellectual history, Barnes placed historical writing on the same level as other historical subjects, and suggested that studying the his-tory of historical writing was valuable simply as a window into its time; in this he was unlike his predecessors, whose goal in showing how historical writing

63. I follow Novick, That Noble Dream, 167, �63, in his definition of relativism, rather than using the broader definition of the term as simply the view that the historian’s interpretations are always a function of his or her background and context, for Novick’s more precise definition serves as a useful way of differentiating Barnes’s recognition of the historian’s subjectivity from that of his predecessors, while at the same time distinguishing Barnes’s form of relativism from a more extreme skepticism that would deny the knowability of truth altogether. The definition of relativism by J. H. Hexter to mean that “in their writing historians inevitably mirror their times” (On Historians, 3�) is so broad that by its terms historians as different as Prescott, Jameson, and Barnes would be considered relativists, thus limiting its usefulness as an analytic category; indeed, Hexter acknowledges that by this definition historical relativism had existed long before Becker published his essays on the subject; see his “Carl Becker and Historical Relativism,” in On Historians, 13-41. On the distinction between relativism and skepticism, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 167, �63. For definitions of relativism that blur this distinction, see Breisach, American Progressive History, 59; and Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, 9, who even uses the term “skeptical relativism.” So, whereas Strout, Pragmatic Revolt, �8-�9, 38-49; Wilkins, Carl Becker, 89-95, 189-�09; and Breisach, American Progressive History, 157-162, 167-169, emphasize the nihilistic implications of Becker’s relativism, I here follow Smith, Carl Becker, 87-101, 104-11�, 1�1-1�3, in arguing for his belief in the possibility of some kind of histori-cal knowledge. Likewise, James Kloppenberg, “Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing,” American Historical Review 94 (1989), 1018-10�0, argues that Becker believed in the need for and possibility of verifying historical facts, however provisional that verification, and indeed questions whether he could be considered a relativist by Novick’s definition.

64. On Becker’s belief in the possibility of error and in the usefulness of distinguishing truth from error, see Smith, Carl Becker, 87, 1�1. On how this understanding of truth was rooted in pragmatism, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 15�-153.

65. On Barnes’s belief in the importance of accurate research, see Davis, “History and Historiography,” 19�; and Curti, “Harry Elmer Barnes as an Historical Critic,” 347-348.

ExcEptIoNal HIStory? ��3

reflected its context was primarily to comment on the state of historical writing in the present.66 Consequently, Barnes even turned historiography itself into a historical subject and included a section on the history of the history of historical writing in his book.67

Yet even as Barnes urged the need to recognize how much historical writing was the product of its context, his actual approach to historiography in some ways went counter to his own prescriptions in that he judged the merits of earlier histo-ries according to his own contemporary standards. Thus, throughout his history of historical writing Barnes constantly assessed the bias (or lack thereof) displayed by historians in the past, as he did when he criticized the biased character of early Christian historical writing for “the absurd relative importance attached to Hebrew history and the serious bias against pagan civilization which made an objective historical perspective out of the question.”68 In making such judgments, Barnes adhered to the very belief in objectivity that he had decried in the scientific historians. Contrary to his claims that all the historian could achieve were “ap-proximations” of truth that were themselves highly contingent and incomplete, Barnes’s unqualified condemnation of the biases of other historians presumed that Barnes himself possessed a knowledge of what constituted objectivity that enabled him to judge whether they had attained this ideal. Paradoxically, then, Barnes went further than Bassett and Jameson in recognizing the extent to which historians were the product of their context, but he was also all the more insistent than they were about his commitment to an ideal of objectivity that divorced the historian from that context.69

Barnes revealed both his commitment to objectivity and the reasons for this commitment when he lamented “the deplorable effects” created by the “danger-ous bias of patriotism.” This bias, according to Barnes, “has not only hampered the calm, objective and accurate handling of historical facts, even by highly trained historians, but it also contributed in no small degree to the great increase in chauvinism which led to the calamity of 1914.” Here, then, in direct contrast to Jameson, who had claimed that objectivity was actually the product of a more secure sense of nationality in the United States, Barnes used the ideal of objectiv-ity to further his critique of nationalism by citing the distortion of objective truth as one of its “deplorable effects.” By opposing nationalism and objectivity in this way, barnes revealed how his hostility to nationalism limited his willingness to view historians as the product of their context.70

66. Harry Elmer barnes, History and Social Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19�6), 65; barnes, History, vii. See Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians, 120-121, on the similarly integral relationship between Becker’s historical relativism and his view of historiography as a branch of intellectual history.

67. barnes, History, 397-40�.68. Ibid., 48.69. On Barnes’s belief in objectivity and his acceptance of historical relativism, see Curti, “Harry

Elmer Barnes as an Historical Critic,” 347-351. More generally on the tensions between the relativ-ism of the New Historians and their persisting commitment to objectivity, see Tyrrell, Absent Marx, ��-�3, 36-39; and Higham, History, 115-131.

70. barnes, History, �36. On Barnes’s concern with the dangers of nationalism, see Curti, “Harry Elmer Barnes as an Historical Critic,” 360-361. And indeed, Novick’s characterization of Barnes as an unwavering objectivist reveals how those objectivist assumptions were rooted in Barnes’s concern


So, while by 191� Jameson had already begun to question the continued viabil-ity of American exceptionalism, Barnes took that challenge even further by repu-diating the belief in American exceptionalism altogether, identifying nationalism itself as a threat to human progress. Indeed, the belief in American exceptionalism embodied for Barnes exactly the kind of national chauvinism that had had such destructive consequences in World War I, as he made clear in his collection of es-says, History and Social Intelligence, published in 19�6. For this reason, Barnes criticized the tendency to single out the nationalistic bias of German historians to blame for World War I, while failing to recognize that “[w]e have exalted our wars and military heroes to nearly the same degree as Germany and have been quite as guilty as she in distorting the history of our foreign relations.”71 In likening Ameri-can nationalism to German nationalism, Barnes directly challenged the exception-alist vision of the United States as a nation exempt from the same processes of his-torical development as the rest of the world, and instead suggested that American nationalism was just as dangerous a force as nationalism in any other country.

It was precisely because historical writing had been such an influential agent of an exclusionary and chauvinistic form of nationalism that historiography was so important to Barnes. In order to combat the power of this kind of nationalism, Barnes believed, it was necessary to transform the writing of history altogether. Historiography could further such a transformation and serve as an antidote to nationalism both by promoting a more objective view of the past and by contribut-ing to a redefinition of the scope and nature of history itself. As Barnes explained, it was necessary “to reconstruct our whole conception of the scope of history and the relative emphasis which is to be put upon different events and forces” so that historians could give more attention to social, economic, and cultural history; he thought such attention would serve as an antidote to the “excessive emphasis on national political, and military history” that had made history all the more effec-tive and dangerous as a tool for the promotion of national chauvinism.72 barnes used historiography to further this goal when he established historical antecedents for the interest of the New Historians in social and cultural history by praising ear-lier historians who had contributed to the study of social and cultural history.73

For example, Barnes considered Herodotus’s work more accurate and truthful than Thucydides’ because Herodotus devoted more attention to social and cul-tural history, and, as Barnes explained, “true historical accuracy requires a con-sideration of the genesis and cultural setting of a situation as certainly as it does the mere formal truth of such facts as are narrated.” By redefining truth to encom-pass “this broader and more fundamental view of historical accuracy,” Barnes

with nationalism, for that characterization is derived largely from Barnes’s revisionist writings. See Novick, That Noble Dream, 208-221.

71. barnes, History and Social Intelligence, �9�-�93.72. barnes, History and Social Intelligence, �93, �85.73. On the New Historians’ concern with broadening historical study to include social history,

see Breisach, American Progressive History, 41-49; Higham, History, 11�-113, 17�-173, 190-197; tyrrell, Absent Marx, �0-�1; Novick, That Noble Dream, 87-90; and Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 51-97. On Barnes’s concern with promoting the program of the New History in his History of Historical Writing, and his commitment to expanding the scope of historical inquiry, see James Martin, “History and Social Intelligence,” in Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, �35-�36; and Reed Bain, “Harry Elmer Barnes as a Social Critic,” in Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes, 490.


sought to reconcile his attack on the scientific historians with his commitment to objectivity.74 Yet as he made such assessments, Barnes revealed in another way the tensions in his understanding of the relationship between the historian and the historical process and the limits of his willingness to view historical writing as the product of its context. Like Jameson and Bassett, Barnes’s approach to historiography was “Whiggish” in measuring earlier historians according to the standards of his own time and in using the past to ratify those standards (differing from Jameson and Bassett only in the nature of those standards). Thus, even as he insisted on the value of historiography as a branch of intellectual history and the importance of analyzing historians in their own context, he himself failed to do so when assessing their commitment to social and cultural history, and in this way seemed to privilege social and cultural history as a higher ideal whose value transcended his own time.75

Although Jameson had actually preceded Barnes in advocating the study of social history, the two historians differed over its relationship to American excep-tionalism. Whereas Jameson had placed American historians on the leading edge of this development, Barnes recognized the contribution of European historians to the rise of social and cultural history, portraying it as the product of a larger international movement brought about by the “expansion of Europe.” In this way, rather than using social history to differentiate the United States from the rest of the world, Barnes hoped that the study of social history would actually demon-strate the nation’s affinity with other countries.76 Where Jameson had turned to social history in order to reconcile his belief in the end of American exceptional-ism with his attachment to exceptionalist premises, Barnes did so as an antidote to the power of nationalism. For Barnes, the traditional emphasis on political and military history served only to reinforce national loyalties that the study of social and cultural history would erode. Because, as he explained, unlike political and military history, “cultural and institutional development is not, never has been, and never can be a strictly national matter,” focusing on social and cultural topics would shift the locus of historical analysis away from the state and require the historian to adopt a more transnational perspective on the past. Thus, if as Ian Tyrrell has argued, professional American historians in this period increasingly disregarded transnational perspectives in favor of a focus on the nation-state,

74. barnes, History, 3�. On Barnes’s view of Herodotus as a model for the study of cultural his-tory, see donald Kelley, Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven: Yale University Press, �003), 313-314. More generally on how the New Historians sought (at least initially) to reconcile their critique of the scientific historians with their commitment to objec-tive truth and their belief in the scientific character of history, see Higham, History, 108-116; White, Social Thought in America, �00-��4; and Breisach, American Progressive History, 50-65.

75. While Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 53, also points to the ahistorical character of the New Historians’ interest in social history, she focuses on their claims for its newness, rather than on their efforts to legitimize its study by projecting their own standards and ideals onto their analysis of earlier historians.

76. barnes, History, 136. In contrast, Higham, History, 17�-173, emphasizes the provincial char-acter of the Progressive historians’ interest in social history. On Jameson as a forerunner to the New History, and the integral relationship between his desire for a new history and exceptionalist ideology, see Kelley, Fortunes of History, 311.


Barnes directly opposed that tendency as he went even further than Jameson in identifying the connections between the United States and other countries.77

By contributing to a more cosmopolitan perspective on the intellectual level, Barnes thought the study of social and cultural history would help establish “that growth of intellectual unity and harmony and that development of likemindedness and sympathy” that were among “the all-essential antecedents of any enduring and effectual world organization” and were thus part of the “basis for a practical inter-nationalism.”78 In his desire for the establishment of an “effectual world organiza-tion,” Barnes, like his former teacher and fellow New Historian James Shotwell, revealed that he did not wish to do away with the nation-state altogether; rather, sharing Shotwell’s commitment to what Charles DeBenedetti terms “International Scientific Progressivism,” his goal was the creation of international organizations that would prevent war by promoting greater cooperation among nation-states.79 As he sought to further this goal by privileging the study of social and cultural history in his history of historical writing, Barnes revealed how his internationalist purposes limited his willingness to recognize that his interest in social and cultural history was itself a historically contingent development.

Barnes’s reluctance to historicize social and cultural history was not only a function of his internationalism but also of his concern with popular appeal. He sought through his work in historiography to reconcile this concern with his desire to uphold the professional authority of historians. Declaring in his preface that his book was “intended to be something more than a compendium of esoteric learn-ing,” Barnes made his concern with popular appeal explicit when he expressed his hope “that the general reader will be interested as well.”80 barnes pointed to how a redefinition of the scope and purpose of history would enhance its popular appeal when he attributed what he saw as the decline of popular interest in history to “archaic conceptions of the nature, scope and purpose of historical writing” that had, “by pedantic exhibitionism” and “the choice of obscure topics,” betrayed the true goal of history “to illuminate humanity and advance human welfare.” Thus, by using historiography to promote the value of social and cultural history as a tool for international peace, Barnes ultimately sought to make history more useful to humanity and therefore more appealing to popular audiences.81

Yet Barnes believed that history could be an effective tool for peace and social progress only in the hands of experts professionally trained in the social sciences. The very breadth and complexity of social and cultural history required in his view exacting knowledge and training on the part of historians. Arguing that the study of social and cultural history necessitated “broader training” for historians that would enable them “to cope with the difficult problem of reconstructing the

77. barnes, History, 383; Tyrrell, “American Historians in the Context of Empire,” 1017, 1034-1037.

78. barnes, History and Social Intelligence, 189.79. Charles DeBenedetti, “James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,” Political

Science Quarterly 89 (1974), 383-384. See also Tyrrell, Historians in Public, 163-165, on Shotwell’s activism in international affairs.

80. barnes, History, ix.81. Ibid., 386-387. More generally on efforts by American historians in this period to reach out to

the larger public, see Tyrrell, Historians in Public, 43-107.


divers phases of the history of civilization,” Barnes believed that such training required them to be “grounded in biology, anthropogeography, psychology and sociology,” a program that would in turn require aspiring historians to follow a plan of study comparable to the kind of training medical students received.82 Here, in aligning history with social science, Barnes expressed the faith shared by the New Historians, and by the Progressive movement more generally, in the authority and usefulness of social science as a tool for human progress.83 for Barnes, then, rather than being mutually exclusive, greater professional training and expertise were actually necessary to increase the popular appeal of history. Only with this kind of training would historians be able to write the kind of social history that would be of interest to the general public. So, even as his program for the New History made it more difficult for untrained amateurs to write history, it would at the same time make that history more accessible to ordinary read-ers. In this way, Barnes reconciled his view of historians as experts possessing technical knowledge and training that distinguished them from the general public with his desire to appeal to that public. As he did so, he also brought together the democratic strand of Progressivism with its elitist belief in the ability of experts to direct and make social processes more rational and efficient by virtue of their scientific knowledge and training.84 As committed as he was to democracy, then, Barnes was even more ambivalent than Bassett about the intellectual capacities of the general public.

In his review of Barnes’s book Carl Becker criticized Barnes and other histori-ographers precisely because of what he considered their presentist approach to the history of historical writing. In Becker’s view, Barnes embodied the tendency that characterized most writing about historiography “[t]o estimate the value of histories and historians from the point of view of modern standards and tech-nique.” In doing so, historiography “provides us, so to speak, with a neat balance sheet of the ‘contributions’ which each historian has made” to current historical knowledge, and as a result serves to validate and privilege the superiority of present-day historians.85 Instead of analyzing historiography in terms of present-day standards of scholarship, Becker urged his readers “to regard historiography

82. barnes, History, 373-374.83. For similarities to Shotwell’s “International Scientific Progressivism,” which sought to apply

the Progressive faith in the ability of experts to improve society through the use of reason and sci-ence to international affairs, see DeBenedetti, “James T. Shotwell and the Science of International Politics,” 380-384. On the New Historians’ desire to align history with the social sciences, see Breisach, American Progressive History, 66-77; Higham, History, 113-114; and Novick, That Noble Dream, 90-9�. On Barnes’s belief in the importance of social science as an agent of social improve-ment, see Bain, “Harry Elmer Barnes as a Social Critic,” 490-491. See Martin, “History and Social Intelligence,” �33-�60, on Barnes’s belief in the value of history for this purpose.

84. On the mixture of elitism and egalitarianism that characterized Barnes’s social thought, see Doenecke, “Harry Elmer Barnes,” �74. On the elitism of the New Historians, see Breisach, American Progressive History, 110-111. More generally on how Progressive thinkers reconciled such elitism with their commitment to democratic ideals, see James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), �67-�77.

85. Becker, “What Is Historiography?,” �4, �0. For further discussion of this essay, see Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians, 1�0-1�1; and Smith, Carl Becker, 210-211.


more simply, more resolutely, as a phase of intellectual history; to forget entirely about the contributions of historians to present knowledge and to concentrate wholly upon their role in the cultural pattern of their own time.” In order to do so, Becker believed, historiography had to abandon the practice of determining what was true or false in earlier historical writing, and simply present such writing as it existed in its own context. In sum, history and the historical consciousness of society more generally should “become a history of history rather than a history of historians, a history of history subjectively understood.”86

Yet, contrary to Becker’s injunctions, later scholars of historiography have for the most part (at least until recently) followed the precedent set by Barnes and his predecessors (in the way they practiced their historiography, if not in the way they theorized about it) by continuing to interpret the history of historical writing in terms of modern standards. They have thus revealed the limits to their willingness to analyze historical writing as the product of its own context. In this way histo-rians since the 1930s have not advanced beyond their predecessors as much as they would like to think. Likewise, the New Historians had more in common with their predecessors than they believed. If, on the one hand, Barnes was more com-mitted to the ideal of objectivity than his attack on the scientific historians would suggest, then on the other hand, Jameson and Bassett revealed that the scientific historians were more willing to acknowledge the subjective character of histori-cal writing and were more concerned with popular appeal than their successors recognized.87 Just by using historiography to ratify their commitment to the ideal of objectivity, Jameson and Bassett laid the basis for challenges to that ideal, for the very notion that the historian could be a historical subject went counter to the assumption that it was possible for the historian to detach himself from his biases. Conversely, even while his interest in historiography reflected his commitment to historical relativism, Barnes’s approach to historiography conflicted with that relativism. And if Barnes differed from Jameson in his repudiation of American exceptionalism, the challenge to exceptionalist premises had already begun to develop with Jameson, for Jameson at once recognized America’s connection to Europe and sought to detach the nation from this connection. Ultimately, then, historicizing the field of historiography not only complicates our understanding of the early history of the historical profession, but more fundamentally, it can serve as an antidote to what Ellen Fitzpatrick has identified as the ahistorical character of American historians’ understanding of the history of their own discipline by showing continuities as well as changes in that history.88

Sarah Lawrence College

86. Becker, “What Is Historiography?,” �5, �6. In this way, Becker anticipated Woolf’s call to rede-fine historiography as “historical culture” in his “Disciplinary History and Historical Discourse,” 1-�5.

87. On the continuities between the scientific and the New Historians, see Tyrrell, Absent Marx, 16-��; Tyrrell, Historians in Public, �5-30; Novick, That Noble Dream, 86-108; and Higham, History, 104-116.

88. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 19�. On the reasons for this problem and the need to recognize the continuities in the history of historical writing, see Higham, History, 89-90. On the value of rec-ognizing both the continuities and the changes in the history of the discipline, see Tyrrell, Historians in Public, 252-255.

EXCEPTIONAL HISTORY? THE ORIGINS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES

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