On the Society and History of CSSH

Extract

My knowledge of the inner workings of CSSH began when the journal had completed its sixth year and was already well known and widely circulated. A few years before, Sylvia L. Thrupp had brought it with her when she moved to Michigan from the University of Chicago. When I joined the Michigan faculty, its presence was one of the attractions. I had been become aware of CSSH in its first year, pointed to it by Robert R. Palmer, who was working on the second volume of his Age of the Democratic Revolution. As we talked about his project, I expressed surprise that more was not being done with historical comparison, and he mentioned, rather skeptically I thought, that there was a new journal I might be interested in. I found the first issues in the library and mentioned them to another Princeton colleague who commented, “When historians don't know enough to write about one place, they write on two.” So I learned from the first that the venture was controversial. In contrast, Joseph R. Strayer told me he thought the new journal very promising, largely because of the woman who had founded it. (Much later, I learned that he had persuaded Princeton to make a small contribution to the journal's founding, and some twenty-five years after that conversation, when both were in their eighties, Joseph Strayer married Sylvia Thrupp).