A: In the late 19th and early 20th century, leaders of the discipline engaged quite broadly with the various activities of history, taking a direct part in the development of professional and content standards for the schools and the gathering of historical materials. At the same time, high school teachers, leaders of historical societies, and librarians could all rise to prominent positions within the AHA.
The net result is not entirely negative, as the professionalization of most aspects of history led to significant improvements in the way history is taught and historical records are maintained and made available to the public.
Nevertheless, the differences often generate friction across the various areas of history work when we could potentially work collaboratively. Q: "It is too late to try to reconstruct a historical enterprise, but there is still time to bring the sundered pieces back together in more active conversation and collaboration with each other.
A: The book developed out of an effort to explain why and how the professional divisions built up over many decades, which can make it so difficult to come together in a spirit of mutual understanding and respect to address growing challenges to our role in public life and the financial resources necessary for that work.
While those in the academic wing of the history discipline can bring substantial content knowledge to the table, they often seem to forget that their potential collaborators bring a significant amount of training and wisdom about their areas of work. As a result, I've been involved in a number of projects that foundered on the academics' failure to appreciate others professional expertise, and a purist view of the way knowledge about their subject should be shaped and delivered.
When these sorts of projects work well, the academics and other history professionals work with a clear understanding about the limits of our respective areas of expertise, and a willingness to work through differences about the way a particular piece of historical information may need to be organized or even simplified for different constituencies and audiences.
To try to open a better foundation for that kind of discussion, I tried to show how the refinement of particular areas of expertise benefited the discipline, but also made it increasingly difficult to speak across professional lines.
Q: "Today," you note, "only about half of the students completing history Ph. This tendency has deep roots in the history of the discipline and I suspect in the humanities more generally , as jeremiads about these same problems go back to the s. Nationwide, history doctoral programs are experimenting with a variety of ways to integrate these often-neglected aspects of professionalization into their courses of study.
Some programs are integrating these skills into traditional content-oriented courses; others are introducing entirely new areas of study such as public history ; and almost all of the programs have started to offer workshops that introduce their students to the job opportunities that are available, and some of the skill sets such as teaching and syllabus preparation that they might need.
As often as not, however, these efforts arise only in response to perceived changes in the job market or the interests of a particular leader in the department, producing only a local and often temporary change. They are more likely to focus on the role of sports, gender, or culture in international and military affairs than on traditional aspects of statecraft.
Meanwhile, the number of military and diplomatic history courses taught in leading departments of history has plummeted. According to statistics compiled by one historian, in the fall of the Harvard history department offered numerous courses dealing with issues such as the world wars, the Cold War, and the history of the British empire.
In , the department had only one course addressing any of these subjects. While direct causation is difficult to prove here, it hardly seems a coincidence that undergraduate interest in history has plummeted just as the discipline has stopped emphasizing subjects that are central to understanding national and international politics alike. And it is probably no accident that in those relatively few elite universities where diplomatic, military, and political history are still respected and taught — Yale University comes to mind — enrollments in history departments remain relatively stable.
There is irony and tragedy aplenty in this situation. The present marginalization of those fields is not simply hurting history enrollments. At a time when international tensions are rising, rivalry among the great powers is sharpening, and the prospect of major international war no longer seems so remote, the historical discipline is devoting scant effort to generating the knowledge that might equip the United States to deal effectively with these challenges. Few historians would quarrel with the notion that more historical knowledge makes for smarter public policy.
Yet academic historians simply are not focusing their efforts on some of the issues that matter most to the fate of the United States and the international system today. Instead of possessing deep historical knowledge that serves as the intellectual foundation for effective policy and informed debate, the nation risks worsening historical ignorance with all its attendant dangers. Quite the contrary — great historians like William McNeil demonstrated that history was the one discipline that could effectively meld these perspectives to better understand a complex, uncertain world.
To do so, however, scholars must actually engage questions that interest those beyond the dwindling, self-enclosed population of ivory tower historians.
Indeed, the pity of the present situation is that rigorous scholarship does not have to be antithetical to public engagement or relevance to current debates. Consider two other disciplines: Economics and the international relations sub-field of political science. Similar to history, both have become specialized and reward methodological innovation.
Both, however, have managed to contribute to public debate and even policy without sacrificing their intellectual integrity. Top academic economists frequently serve in national and global institutions.
Yet because the historical profession tends to penalize rather than reward such efforts, it is marginalizing itself at the worst possible time. Schools of international affairs, public policy, business, and law, and even political science departments, have hired leading historians working on political, military, and diplomatic issues.
There is a limit to what these institutions can do, because many of them are not involved either in educating undergraduates or in training the PhD students who will be the next generation of academic historians. Instead, we have concentrated our attention on history as a discipline and profession, with special attention to the social scientific sector, loosely defined.
The kinds of questions we ask are: Who are the historians? What do they do? How do they work? What do they want and need? And what can be done about it? The first large section of the report treats the discipline of history in general and seeks to define the characteristics of social scientific history in terms of ideal types. It includes summary findings of a survey of about six hundred working historians which the panel undertook in the spring of The next section describes some of the varieties of social scientific history, their achievements, limitations, and promise.
Then we turn to the resources, working, and needs of the profession—first in teaching, then in research. A special section is devoted to library problems; another, to the role of foreign scholars. Finally, we sum up the observations and recommendations made along the way. If we are to concentrate on history as social science, we need some sense of what sets history off from other social sciences. The contribution of history is perspective.
This is no small matter. It is only too easy and tempting for each generation especially the more sensitive members of each generation to see the tests and troubles of its own time as unique. For many, what is past is past, what matters is now and sometimes later. This is particularly true of social engineers who, however much they may be motivated by the recollection of past wrongs, do not want to be discouraged by the record of past mistakes. Yet never is the perspective of history so valuable as when men try to shape their destiny, that is, try to change history.
Then, if ever, man has to know how he came to this pass; otherwise he is condemned to repeat his errors or at best to blunder through one difficulty only to arrive at another. In this sense history, if read correctly, should help make men wise. Not everyone would agree. There has always been a body of opinion within the historical profession that has denied the possibility of an objective history—for the very cogent reason that it is simply impossible for the historian to perceive the past except through eyes distorted by personal values and sympathies.
Each man, in this view, is his own historian. As for the lessons of history, men choose these to their purpose. Israelis cite Jewish history to demonstrate the justice and passion of their attachment to the Holy Land; Palestinians point to their own history—as recorded in the Bible—to argue that they were there first. Some supporters of the American military intervention in Vietnam have drawn an analogy to Munich and the appeasement of the s to justify firmness in the face of totalitarian aggression; some of their opponents have gone back to ancient Athens for lessons in the folly of arrogance.
History is not alone in this respect. One could cite any number of other examples of self-serving analogy, even of conflicting inferences from the same body of evidence, from any of the behavioral and social sciences. Indeed, a lawyer might remark that this is the human condition: people will always see things differently—that is what keeps the courts busy. It would be a serious mistake, however, to infer from these difficulties that our ignorance is inevitable and irreducible.
The understanding that results cannot be complete or definitive: the social scientist typically deals with a realm of probability, but as his techniques have become more refined and powerful, the probabilities and usefulness of his answers have increased. The gains have been greatest in those areas where the social scientist has been able to simplify his problems by exclusion of all but a few paramount variables.
The best example is economics. History, by comparison, has and always will have a hard time: the matter to be studied is inherently complex some would say, infinitely complex and resistant to simplification.
That, however, only makes the task harder and the results of inquiry necessarily looser. It does not rule out a closer approach to the goal of truth. Historians have often treated the complexity and particularity of their material as a good in itself. They have pursued the essential wisdom by immersing themselves in a particular time and place until they absorb its ethos, its rules of action, its everyday routines.
The deep immersion sometimes produces marvelous reconstructions of the past, as when a Jacob Burkhardt takes us to Renaissance Italy. If the product of research is personal, it is not necessarily cumulative or additive. Hence the remark of one of our correspondents:. Demand quality and accept no substitutes. For similar reasons historians are often suspicious of courses in methodology and hostile to any kind of normalization of research procedure. If historiography is art, it cannot and must not be reduced to some kind of routine.
These values have, to be sure, a strong intellectual justification. Insofar as history attempts to see things whole, it is more dependent than other disciplines on individual perceptions. Interpretation and understanding are never routine; there are too many variables to reduce the analysis to some kind of procedure. Hence it is important that each scholar dig down to bedrock. He comes with new questions and concepts to old material as well as new; and if he permits himself to rely entirely on the ruminations of others, he has given half the game away.
It is one thing to justify this attitude in principle, however, and another to establish it as a moral absolute. No other discipline builds so slowly, because the members of no other discipline are so reluctant as historians to stand on the shoulders of others. All historians can recall criticisms of colleagues and students on the ground that their work was too derivative at one point or another, that it relied too heavily on secondary sources.
Does our picture of the historical profession seem exaggerated?
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