Essay B - Political Science

Summary

As universities modernized in the post-Civil War decades, schools and departments dedicated to the study of political science emerged at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. In the early years, the study of political science tended to be combined with the study of history or other social sciences. Gradually, political science took shape as a distinct field of inquiry. The founding of Columbia’s School of Political Science in 1880 was an important milestone in this regard. Markers of professionalization multiplied thereafter. In 1903, the American Political Science Association (APSA) emerged as the discipline’s professional organization, breaking away from the American Historical Association, under which political science had been subsumed since the 1880s. The American Political Science Review, the APSA’s professional journal, began publishing in 1906. By the early twentieth century, separate departments of political science had emerged at major universities and colleges across the country.¹