Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the older wide and practical sense of political science gave way to a new, narrower, and professionalized sense that maps political science onto just one of the array of research-centered academic disciplines collectively labeled as the 'social sciences'. Disciplinary histories are, with varying levels of explicitness, informed by contemporary identities and agendas within political science, and concerned to inform the present and future of the discipline. Interwar convergence in America toward the freestanding political science department as a standard institution and the accompanying tying of the identity "political scientist" to location in such an institution neither assumed nor entailed a consensus on the substance, methods, or aims of political science. Globalization in disciplinary histories has involved, however, not only looking beyond America to other national contexts, but also resituating the history of American political science in transnational and global context.