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This chapter continues to examine the changing relationships between archivists and historical scholars but now from the archivists’ perspective. It looks closely at the challenges archives began to face as a result of vast increases in the quantity of records generated by post-World War II bureaucratic growth. These changes pressed archivists to move away from well-established “custodial” notions of archives as a repository for historical memory to radically different concepts of organizational records management. In these circumstances, historical scholarship became increasingly less able to inform the authoritative categories supporting archival descriptive systems and records appraisal. The chapter concludes by examining the important conceptual, as well as practical, consequences of this turn away from historical authority, how this has affected archival involvement in the production of historical knowledge, and the effect of this turn on archivists’ own professional identities.

This chapter explores the “clash of values” between academic and public historians. It defines the similarities and differences between them and the reasons for the formation of separate organizations for public historians and suggests that the American Historical Association responded more positively to the challenge from public historians than the Organization of American Historians has until recently.

Herbert Baxter Adams, the first secretary of the American Historical Association (AHA), declared that its creation ushered in “a new historical movement” that would set the stage for “modern” and “scientific” historical research practices. In 1876, Adams joined the new Johns Hopkins University in 1876 to teach history. Over the next twenty-five years, the discipline developed four basic elements of professionalization for history scholarship: an idealized site for employment in academia, an ideology focused on the “scientific” study of history, a system of training and certification, and an institutional apparatus for disseminating the fruits of the new scholarship. The establishment of the AHA is often considered the fifth element, but its role remained unclear during the period. Under Adams’s direction, the AHA introduced a scholarly publishing program shortly after it was founded in 1884.

After spending nearly twenty-five years in academia, J. Franklin Jameson left his position at the University of Chicago in 1904 to work at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Historical Research. Jameson encouraged the collection and publication of primary source material as well as improved archiving practices which, combined with his shift from academic to non-academic employment, signaled the emergence of other forms of work in the historical enterprise. In 1895 the American Historical Association (AHA) created its first independent committee in the organization, the Historical Manuscripts Commission, to collect information regarding manuscripts relating to American history. Four years later, the Public Archives Commission was born. In 1904, the AHA convened a Conference of Historical Societies. The AHA also played a major role in providing a platform for the early professionalization of archivists. By 1910 a growing number of societies and archival agencies began to gather, curate, and share systematically historical materials for their areas of responsibility.

As as result of the increasing diversity of the students, schools, and other participants in the educational system after 1910, academics gradually felt alienated from the professional aspects of history teaching. In addition, the academic members of the discipline were splitting into separate camps on a number of fundamental issues related to teaching. In late 1910, the American Historical Association (AHA) Council decided to revive and adopt History Teacher’s Magazine, which had suspended operations earlier in the fall, and subsidized its production in exchange for discounted subscriptions for members. Despite its support for the magazine, the AHA’s attention to teaching issues, particularly teacher training, quickly began to drift. Another challenge came from a movement to integrate history into other social science disciplines, lumped together under the umbrella term “social studies.” An AHA committee on “History for Education and Citizenship” conducted a survey to find out how the citizenship issue was being integrated into history instruction at the elementary and high school levels.

After 1926, differences within the historical enterprise began to take a more concrete shape. Members of the American Historical Association (AHA) based in archives and historical societies began to identify themselves as working in a discrete professional environment. Meanwhile, academics viewed archivists and the staff at historical societies as discrete professional groups with a unique and separate set of skills and interests to them. In 1936, a new professional organization, the Society of American Archivists (SAA), was born. The AHA Council formally welcomed the SAA, to which it relinquished the work and activities of the Public Archives Commission. By 1941, archivists, academics, and historical societies had already accepted the fact that they represented entirely different professional interests and differing jurisdictions with regards to history as a discipline.

By 1910 it became clear to leaders of the historical enterprise that it was difficult to view history as a unified discipline. This was due to broad arguments for a “New History” and the growing numbers of graduate-trained, employed historians interested in esoteric subjects. Historians then began to consider a more abstract collective notion of historical scholarship. The American Historical Association (AHA) was increasingly seen by academic historians as a professional association for the discipline, not only to police transgressions but also to encourage greater research activity. During the AHA’s 1910 meeting, Frederick Jackson Turner and James Harvey Robinson both articulated the New History idea and strongly challenged a discipline still largely oriented to producing political histories derived from official documents. The proliferation of publishing outlets led to a rapid growth in the publication of dissertations and other scholarly monographs on history, which proved to be a boon to the history scholarship.

Between 1910 and 1925, the American Historical Association (AHA) began to show a keen interest in the work of other historical institutions. Subtle changes in professional resources and networks affected the relationship between academics and the specialists employed in other areas of the historical enterprise. By 1925, history graduate students increasingly saw the societies as a legitimate area of employment. The AHA’s Public Archives Commission and Conference of Archivists came up with a series of reports that provided some of the core professionalization literature for the succeeding generations of historians. With an eye towards stronger cooperation, historical organizations reorganized the Conference of Historical Societies in 1916, transforming it into a “semi-independent organization” within the AHA. However, the AHA would see a reduced role in providing leadership for the professional concerns of historical societies, archives, and related organizations.

The first half of this chapter examines the department of historical and political science at the new Johns Hopkins University. It identifies the multiple currents of historicist science brought together in the department in its 1880s heyday by its leading faculty: Herbert Baxter Adams and Richard T. Ely. Doing so illuminates the specific manner in which Ely’s view of industrialization as socially transformative underwrote the new late-century vision of progressive liberalism. The chapter’s second half contrasts the consensual 1884 founding of the American Historical Association with the controversy-laden middle to late 1880s early years of the American Economics Association. This comparison completes the argument, developed across chapters 4 and 5, that political economy was the area within political science in which divides and then divergence in the liberal visions of political scientists first came to the fore.

After 1925, the American Historical Association (AHA) narrowed its responsibilities and focused on being a professional organization intended primarily for “research men”—that is, historians with PhDs, employed in academia yet relatively unburdened by teaching responsibilities. The AHA trained its sights on professional standards in one area of the historical enterprise—academia—even as its leadership began drawing primarily from the students and faculty of a small cluster of elite universities. The narrowed focus on particular research concerns prevented the association from engaging fully in intellectual work on other activities, such as developing curricula or policies about history teaching. As teaching arrangements were assimilated into or with disciplines at many institutions, historical research continued to become fragmented into increasingly narrow topics. The proliferation of history publications contributed to the trend toward specialization in the history profession.

The “research men” and those who considered themselves teachers, diverged professionally as the professional literature and networks became more distinct and as they coexisted amid the growing number of competing voices from the education community and the other teaching disciplines. The American Historical Association (AHA) formed a Commission on the Social Studies in an attempt to define the role of history teaching the classroom and the professional employment of teachers. However, the initiative was beset with problems from the start and this forced the AHA leaders to cede most of this area of the historical enterprise to the education community. In 1924 Waldo Leland, the secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies, called on the AHA Council to engage with social studies once more. By the time the AHA’s Commission on the Social Studies completed its work, social studies teachers had already assumed a professional identity that was distinct and separate from that of history teachers.

Teaching in schools was instrumental in establishing history as a profession. The impetus for the American Historical Association (AHA) arose in large part from the emergence of history after the Civil War as a discrete subject for teaching in secondary schools and in universities. In 1892, the National Education Association sponsored the first significant effort to develop a national curriculum that involved some of the AHA’s most distinguished academic members. This effort, known as the Committee of Ten report, combined two arguments for history teaching in the schools: support of the civic good and promotion of “mental discipline” under the notion of “training of the mind.” Although the connection between history and politics helped to establish history in the curricula, it was a very unstable foundation. The AHA also formed a Committee of Seven to further study history in schools. By 1910, the Committee of Seven report continued to set the standard for the discipline’s place in the school curriculum.

This book explores history in the context of an expanded vision of the historical enterprise. It looks at a number of separate microprofessionalization projects in history that contributed to the current divided state. It examines how competing spheres of professional identity and practice emerged in the historical enterprise from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. It examines the interests of faculty and doctoral students in research universities and highlights the membership of the American Historical Association to situate historians in academia within the larger historical enterprise. It also considers different types of public history work as well as the development of the history teaching profession.

In 1974 Richard Gambino, together with Ernest Falbo and Bruno Arcudi, founded Italian Americana. This historical and cultural journal followed the wave of interest in Italian Americans that had been building in the previous decade and that became particularly strong that year owing to Gambino's book, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans. He elucidated the culture of the family and community in the lives of Italian Americans and wove personal experiences “typical and illustrative of the Italian-American saga” through his historical and sociological scholarship. Already in the late 1960s, a small group of Italian-American scholars had met at the initiative of Rudolph Vecoli to discuss forming an academic association devoted to Italian-American studies. This resulted in the founding of the American Italian Historical Association in 1969. This book acts as glosses on the classics of Italian-American literature.

The fragmentation of large areas of history work into separate professional organizations in the late 1930s led to the demise of the historical enterprise. Although the various history professions still interacted and often even collaborated on issues of common concern, they firmed up their own networks and identities in increasing isolation from one another and embarked on separate processes of specialization and technical refinement. Within a decade following World War I, the number of new history PhDs conferred each year more than doubled. Outside the American Historical Association (AHA), the organizations that represented other areas of professional history work generally thrived over the same period. On subjects ranging from teaching to archives and publishing, the AHA carried out its activities as separate spheres of work with their own professional codes and best practices. Many in the association realized the profound consequences of separating from branches of the historical enterprise that lay outside of academia.

This chapter focuses on William Dodd's opposition to dissent against World War I and his desire to contribute more directly to the United States's war effort, particularly in the area of public information on the subject of the war. It also considers Dodd's support for the national drive for greater food production as part of his public service, his resumption of the American Historical Association activities he had avoided for more than four years, and his renewed identification as a professional historian. Finally, it looks at Dodd's book The Cotton Kingdom, about the lower South in the two decades before the Civil War, along with his series of lectures in and around Chicago on “The Chance for Democracy in the Country at the End of the War” and his book on Woodrow Wilson.

This chapter compares the contemporaneous efforts by champions of distinct historical enterprises to demonstrate that they could create and sustain professional scholars worthy of the mantle of the Romantic man of letters. It compares the idealized personae created by Professor J. Franklin Jameson to those created by competing factions within the for-profit research company that produced what became the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. It demonstrates that Jameson and representatives from Bancroft’s History Company all claimed that their enterprises could synthesize and sustain genius, calling to mind the heroic man of letters who could believably promise to meet the onerous expectations of the archival turn. Just as importantly, this chapter examines what we stand to gain and to lose in different permutations of the ‘scholarly persona’ by experimenting with the results produced by aligning different traits with scholarly personae while reducing others to supporting structures like templates or repertoires.