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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.