History

The writing of history, and historical scholarship in a larger sense, dates back to ancient Greece and the writings of

Herodotus and Thucydides, who retold the myths and chronicled the wars of their society. For centuries, recording of past times was the common pursuit of court chroniclers and political writers, who sought advantage, registered complaints, or sought to explain the origins of their countries and religions. By the 19th century, gifted amateurs and novelists, university teachers and political hacks participated in the business of writing history for both popular and academic audiences. In the late 19th century, however, history began to emerge as one of the central disciplines in the modern university.

Historians who sought the privilege and status of a profession established formal programs of education, formulated new practices, and created a new professional subculture for those in training. The history seminar and the archive took on new form and meaning in professionalizing how the past was recorded, written, and analyzed. In the new academic discipline of history, amateurs, historical novelists, and those who played to a popular audience were no longer historians in the same way as were their professional university-trained counterparts. Further, the dominant leaders in the discipline of history, and the overwhelming majority of its university teachers, were men, specifically white Protestant European and American men. Women, when they did write history, were thought to be amateurish, to engage in “pots and pans” history of ordinary life rather than the noble business of political history. Minority historians were similarly charged with writing either about trivial concerns or with too much personal investment. From the perspective of the new emerging profession, they fell far short of the standards of objective truth.

In the United States, the historical profession was well established in universities by the early years of the 20th century. A handful of prestigious schools, including Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin, provided a home for the new generation of “progressive” historians who brought new questions, methods, interpretations, and—above all— a progressive perspective to a historical profession that was wedded to more conservative and narrow readings of the past. They also brought into history the methods and materials of the social sciences as a whole, in particular from economics, sociology, and political science, and reshaped the subject matter and interpretation of history. In many ways, the progressive historians challenged the practices of their own teachers. Capturing the past “wie es eigentliche war” (as it really was), in the words of German historian Von Ranke, was to be the goal of all historians. Other 19th-century historians celebrated history as the story of the nation-state from a supposedly objective perspective.

Progressive historians Charles Beard, Vernon Par-rington, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Carl Becker had in mind a different version of history—one in which objectivity, an ideal already challenged in the philosophy of science, was less important than rigorous analysis and an understanding of history as the story of conflict and contestation over resources in society. Turner in his studies of the frontier and sectionalism, Beard in his retelling of the making of the Constitution, and Parrington in his recounting of American intellectual and cultural life focused on the conflicts that arose during the development of the United States as a nation. While they were imbued with an understanding of scientific history, they also sought to link their history to a new politics and a new understanding of identity. In fact, Carl Becker radically challenged the ideal of objectivity and, implicitly, professional standards when, as president of the American Historical Association, he invoked the idea of “every man his own historian.”

The roster of American historians during the era included not simply the professionals who taught at the great universities but historians like Lucy Maynard Salmon of Vassar College, whose studies of newspapers, material culture, and domestic service offered a radical reimagining of what history might be; W. E. B. DuBois, whose work was located at the crossroads of sociology and history; Carter Woodson, the editor of the Journal of Negro History, whose work was pivotal to the recovery and restoration of the African-American past; and Mary Beard, whose Woman as Force in History inspired a later generation of women historians and overturned simple narratives of women’s oppression to understand women’s status and power in real terms. With her husband Charles, Mary Beard wrote important overviews of both American history and the history of Western civilization. She also wrote histories of labor unions and American humor, altering not just the method but expanding the subject matter worthy of historical study. These are but a few names of that generation of historians who merged concern for audience and political consequence in their work with new standards for historical analysis.

By 1930, the historical profession was well established. It had taken its place among the social sciences as a central discipline in higher education and in intellectual life. At the same time, history as a subject for amateur historians, novelists, filmmakers, and museum curators took on new meaning. While “popular” history was the subject of ridicule in the academy, widespread interest in roots, from the American Antiquarian Society and heritage associations, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Confederacy, to the popularity of historical films and mass-market historical fiction, preserved documents, historical sites, and material culture for the use and interpretation of subsequent generations.

See also LITERATURE; MOVIE INDUSTRY.

Further reading: Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880-1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1841-1935) associate justice of the Supreme Court

One of the American jurists most responsible for the retreat from legal formalism, Oliver Wendell Holmes served on the U. S. Supreme Court for more than 30 years. In his career on the bench, Holmes contributed to a growing body of civil liberties and policy law that expanded the role of the federal government. At the same time, he argued for the protection of individuals’ rights to free speech, free assembly, and free press. Most of Holmes’s influence, ironically, came from his articulate dissents from majority opinion. At a time when judges at both the state and the federal level continued to be enamored of natural law and highly protective of property rights, Holmes ventured into a legal philosophy that saw law and the courts not as a natural and inevitable development but as a response to the needs of society. Arguing for judicial restraint, Holmes envisioned a judiciary that would not heedlessly reject the democratic will. He developed his arguments for flexible and pragmatic application of the law in conversation with a younger generation of legal theorists, including LouIs D. BRANDEIS and Roscoe Pound. His influence lingered on the Supreme Court with the appointment of Brandeis and later Felix Frankfurter to the bench.

Few of Holmes’s achievements could have been predicted from his family background. His father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, was a doctor and a poet, whose poem on “Old Ironsides” kept the USS Constitution from being scrapped. The younger Holmes was born on March 8, 1841, in Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard University, he joined the Union Army and served for three years during the Civil War, seeing action in the Union Debacle at Ball’s Bluff, at Antietam, where he was left for dead, and at Fredericksburg. He was wounded three times before requesting and receiving a staff job. He left the army with the rank of captain. In 1867, Holmes was admitted to the bar and began to practice law. Holmes married Fanny Bowditch Dixwell in 1872. From 1870 to 1873, he edited the American Law Review and publicly lectured on common law. In 1882, while in his first term as law professor at Harvard, Holmes received an appointment to the Massachusetts State Supreme Court. He served on the court for 20 years, the last three as chief justice. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt appointed Holmes to the U. S. Supreme Court as an associate justice. In that role, he wrote some of his most significant judicial opinions. In the case of Buck v. Bell, Holmes exhibited some of his conservative social views. As a progressive proponent of eugenics, Holmes believed in social engineering and held similar views on human heredity. Carrie Buck’s individual rights mattered little, compared to the threat that hereditary criminality and idiocy presented to society. Besides, he famously uttered, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” In a series of cases after World War I, Holmes essentially created the modern theory of civil liberties. Although in the first of these, Schenck v. United States, he argued a more conservative point of view that freedom of speech was not unlimited, his later dissents in Abrams v. United States and other cases redefined the First Amendment. Holmes wrote that it was the “theory of our Constitution” that “the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Democracy, he proclaimed, required us to be “eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.” Holmes served on the Court until he retired in 1932 at age 91.

Further reading: Albert W. Altschuler, Law without Values: The Life, Work and Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Harry Houdini (Library of Congress)