In Back Issues
It used to be common practice for newspapers to print short features consisting of excerpts from past articles that provided a glimpse of what had been in the news twenty‐five, fifty, or even a hundred years earlier. These snippets from past issues were curiosities, allowing readers to reflect upon what was considered newsworthy in those distant days, or reminding them of great and epoch‐making events in the past, or perhaps merely humoring them with the thought that people have always been exercised by trivialities and ephemeral fashions. Such snippets were all that readers could savor at the moment, for the actual newspapers of the time were far out of reach, perhaps accessible by microfilm in a library, but certainly not easily retrievable. Now, of course, we live in a very different world, with whole archives and inventories of past material, including newspapers and scholarly journals, only a few mouse clicks away. Are we historians taking advantage of the historical inventory of our own forebears?
In many ways, the answer is clearly yes. In both scholarship and teaching, we access and consult articles from the past far more often than we did just a few years ago. But what impact has this accessibility had on how we think of our profession, of its development over time, and of our relationship to those scholars on whose shoulders we still stand? In the Renaissance, the recovery of classical texts had the initial effect of bringing antiquity closer to the humanists and other scholars who studied them, but further study had the opposite effect, instructing them in the distance in language, culture, and years that separated them from those ancient times. In a lesser sense, it would seem that the remarkable and rather sudden availability of materials, both primary and secondary, in electronic form to historians and students of history ought to have a similar, interestingly contradictory, impact of creating both proximity and distance between us and historians of the past. It is fair to say that most historians have some sense of how our discipline has progressed or developed over the several generations of its existence as an academic profession. But it is likely that these views are largely ill‐informed—caricatures of the historical research and writing that was actually carried out. Some of us are hardly immune to the “enormous condescension” toward historians of previous generations, whose contributions we can easily dismiss as fatally flawed by wrong‐headed, narrow‐minded, simplistic, or even reactionary approaches and assumptions. Others are not exempt from an uncritical, nostalgic view of past history writing, seeing it as endowed with those pleasing virtues—strong narratives, accessible prose, intellectual certitude—that contemporary historians have supposedly forsaken. Whatever our attitude toward or knowledge of past scholarship, increased familiarity with what historians actually produced, as well as the methods and themes that guided their research and writing, cannot fail to enrich our own understanding of the discipline of history.
In the hope of encouraging readers to dip into the long history of scholarship contained in the pages of the American Historical Review over the 114 years of its publishing history—and to take advantage of the digital availability of this archive to most readers—the AHR editors have decided to add a new feature, offering a look back at issues from one hundred, fifty, and twenty‐five years ago. “In Back Issues” will not be a comprehensive survey of the contents of those issues, but rather a glance at some of the articles and other features that might be of interest, or even of use, today.
Volume 15, Number 1 (October 1909)
The October 1909 issue is an auspicious one to begin with because it was published in the year that marked the twenty‐fifth anniversary of the founding of the American Historical Association, which prompted the Editor of the AHR, J. Franklin Jameson, to reflect on its short history in the lead article. His piece, “The American Historical Association, 1884–1909,” is more than celebratory, and offers some interesting comments on the establishment of the AHA. To start with, Jameson suggests, in a self‐evident tone that might surprise present‐day readers, that scholarly societies, not universities, were primarily responsible for “the advancement of pure research” that had occurred in recent years. Clearly, he considered the AHA to be one of these. He revisits the founding of the AHA in 1884, suggesting different ways to understand its genesis. The wider view is that it was a “natural” development for “the great war for nationality”—obviously the Civil War—to “be followed within twenty years by a great outburst of historical activity,” something that should be no more surprising to “the student of the history of historical writing” than “that the Reformation should breed historians, or that the first epoch‐making works [of French and German history] should appear within twenty years after the Napoleonic conflict.” But he also points to the specific conditions of its emergence. It was at the 1883 annual meeting of the American Social Science Association—a society that, having been founded in 1865, predated the AHA by nearly twenty years—that the “call for the meeting at which the American Historical Association was founded was signed.” A meeting the following year in Saratoga, New York, witnessed its formal beginnings.
Questions soon arose regarding how the AHA should be constituted, in particular its relationship to the American Social Science Association. One participant argued against establishing a separate society, citing “the evils of excessive specialization.” But the proponents of “independence” carried the day. Another view was that the AHA should take the form of an “Academy of History,” with a restricted membership; the question, in the words of one in favor of an academic model, was “whether we should try to be as big as possible or as good as possible.” Jameson finds the reasoning here specious and clearly endorses the route taken: “Diffusion of influence, diffused participation, is the democratic mode.” He also notes a subsequent “turning‐point in the history of the society”—its incorporation by an act of Congress in 1888. Again there was controversy, with some members expressing “aversion” to this move, likening it to the deleterious effects that “patronage of ‘the great’ had in the eighteenth century, and that of monarchs before and since.” While Jameson acknowledges the possible danger in government sponsorship, pointing to “censorship vested in the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution,” he also expresses confidence, with a sanguinity that most contemporary readers would probably find amusing, that this appointee “is likely to be a discreet man, aware of his limitations, and of the probability that an historical association can judge better [than he] as to what publications will advance the cause of history.” Nevertheless, problems with censorship did arise. The AHA's Annual Reports to Congress had to receive a governmental imprimatur. In one case, cited by Jameson with barely disguised incredulity, an essay on the Spiritual Franciscans of the thirteenth century was ruled by the authorities of the Smithsonian Institution to be unfit for publication because it treated a religious subject.
The balance of Jameson's essay is taken up with a discussion of the annual meetings of the AHA, its growth in membership, its funding, its service to the government, its work in helping to preserve manuscripts and other historical records, and, of course, the establishment of the American Historical Review, “independently of the American Historical Association, and supported for three years by a separate association of guarantors”—this last remark a rather cryptic qualification that the curious might want to investigate further.
Volume 65, Number 1 (October 1959)
It just so happens that the October 1959 issue includes another essay by Jameson, “The Future Uses of History.” As the editors note, however, this is a slightly edited version of a paper that was delivered at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., in December 1912, included here “not only in recognition of the centenary of Jameson's birth, but as an illustration of his vision.” It is pertinent to add, as the editors do, that Jameson was managing editor of the AHR for thirty years. The piece is placed in a section of the journal called “Notes and Suggestions,” and it is accompanied by another contribution, “The British Empire and Commonwealth in Recent Historiography,” by Philip D. Curtin (a past president of the AHA, who died this summer). Curtin's piece is interesting in several respects, but mostly for the way he urges historians not to rely exclusively on the materials and archives found in London but to seek out evidence and documents in the colonies or former colonies themselves. He recounts the experience of Sir Keith Hancock, a historian who had completed a manuscript on the Maltese constitution and then, as an afterthought, traveled to Malta “with the intention of adding a little local color and filling in a few gaps.” Instead, he found the experience so impressive and revealing that he discarded his manuscript and began again. “Too many historians never made the trip at all, and their manuscripts ended in print rather than in the wastebasket,” Curtin comments.
The October 1959 issue also includes a thirty‐three‐page section listing recent journal articles in a range of fields.
Volume 89, Number 4 (October 1984)
It may seem merely coincidental that J. Franklin Jameson again surfaces in the AHR in the October 1984 issue. But such is not the case: 1984 was the centenary of the AHA's founding, and Jameson, as someone who not only was a past president and long‐time editor of the AHR but also was present at the association's creation, was an important source and point of reference in this issue dedicated to “The First Hundred Years” of the AHA. He figures in two of the issue's pieces: “‘To Set a Standard of Workmanship and Compel Men to Conform to It’: John Franklin Jameson as Editor of the American Historical Review,” by Morey D. Rothberg; and “J. Franklin Jameson, Carter G. Woodson, and the Foundations of Black Historiography,” by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick. It is interesting to read the first of these with, or against, Jameson's own essay on the founding of the AHA in the October 1909 issue, for they cover much of the same material, and Rothberg's article uses Jameson's as a source. The “Research Note” by Meier and Rudwick documents Jameson's efforts to find financial support for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and the Journal of Negro History.
Two other articles in this special issue deal with wider questions regarding the development of historical scholarship in the United States. In the lead article, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth‐Century America,” Dorothy Ross attempts to explain the intellectual and social conditions that gave rise to the historicist, as opposed to providential, understanding of historical development. After a survey of primarily nineteenth‐century intellectual history, she concludes her analysis by evoking the social changes at the end of the century as a primary factor in explaining the new “historical consciousness” of the period. In “Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography,” Daniel Joseph Singal offers a portrait of this important American historian that depicts him as resisting simple labels, and certainly not as a celebrant of “American virtue characteristic of the consensus school.”
As a general comment on the October 1984 issue, it might be noted that a commemorative issue of the AHR today, in 2009, even one in which the focus is on the AHA itself, would certainly not neglect non‐American influences or comparisons as this one did.
Our hope with this new section of the AHR is that an engagement with what historians actually wrote, especially in the premier scholarly journal of the profession, might prompt us to take a more nuanced, appreciative, or at least measured view of past scholarship. Some material will remind us how far we have traveled in methodological sophistication, in the breadth of our concerns, in our analytical rigor, in our theoretical awareness, and in the depth of the evidence we deploy. But undoubtedly, too, there will be much of value, prompting us to think about the long‐term themes and problems that have been pursued over the generations, though sometimes abandoned in more recent times. In short, in these back issues we might find more that is useful, or at least interesting, than we previously assumed.