1 - The European legacy: Ranke, Bacon, Flaubert

Summary

By 1884, the year of the founding of the American Historical Association, the United States had a favorable balance of trade: exports exceeded imports by over $100 million annually. The gap widened to over $500 million by the turn of the century, as more and more American cotton, wheat, machinery, and other products flowed abroad. But in these years, and for some time to come, the United States remained a net importer of ideas.

As American historians constructed their system of professional norms, and in particular the central norm of objectivity, they drew heavily on various European currents of thought. German historical scholarship was an unavoidable model—and had the advantage of borrowed prestige. Much the same was true of “scientific method,” in an age when scienticity was the hallmark of the modern and the authoritative. They opted for an austere style which would clearly distinguish professional historical work from the florid effusions of the amateur historians whom the professionals sought to displace.

Based on their understanding of these currents—often, as we shall see, based on their misunderstanding of them—American historians laid the foundations of professional historiographical thought and sensibility in the United States.

“That Germany possessed the sole secret of scholarship,” wrote Bliss Perry, “was no more doubted by us young fellows in the eighteen-eighties than it had been doubted by George Ticknor and Edward Everett when they sailed from Boston, bound for Göttingen, in 1814.”