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Professions in Process: Changing Relations Between Historians and Educators, 1896–1911

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

N. Ray Hiner
N. Ray Hiner*
Affiliation:
History and Education at the University of Kansas
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Extract

In 1884 “A small band of zealous young scholars fresh from German seminars” organized the American Historical Association “to propagate and give new direction to ‘American history and history in America.’” In one sense, these self-conscious professionals institutionalized a fundamental element of nineteenth-century thought; they shared with many Americans a deep commitment to historicism and its two central tenets: the belief that all human life is in a process of continual growth and transformation and the related conviction that facts and events can be explained only by reference to earlier facts and events. In a century in which change and process were bywords, “the historical method” was a highly respected thought tool. “To know a thing properly,” as William Torrey Harris expressed it, “we must study it in its history.” The study of history satisfied an almost compelling psychic need of nineteenth-century Americans to reexperience time, to analyze it, to capture it conceptually, and thereby in a personal way to control it. They found great psychological comfort in tracing a modern institution or trend to its very roots. It should be no surprise, then, that a profound sense of the continuity of human experience, “an historical mindedness,” was a cherished goal in an age so characterized by discontinuity. No surprise, either, that history was the first of the social sciences to be organized on a national scale.

Type
Progressivism Revisited
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Spring 1972 , pp. 34 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by New York University 

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References

Notes

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52. Ibid., p. 12.Google Scholar

53. See Correspondence in American Historical Association Records (Committees, Miscellany, Container 460; and Executive Council, Secretary's File, Container 243).Google Scholar

54. Letter from A. C. McLaughlin to C. H. Haskins, April 30, 1910, in American Historical Association Records (Container 243).Google Scholar

55. Letter from C. H. Haskins to A. C. McLaughlin, May 2, 1910, in ibid.Google Scholar

56. Letter from A. C. McLaughlin to C. H. Haskins, June 10, 1910, in ibid.Google Scholar

57. Letter from A. C. McLaughlin to C. H. Haskins, January 5, 1911, in ibid.Google Scholar

58. The Study of History in Secondary Schools, pp. 22–24.Google Scholar

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