OAH Magazine Celebrates OAH Centennial

To mark the centennial of the OAH, the April 2007 issue of the OAH Magazine of History, of which I am the guest editor, will be devoted entirely to two sets of developments over the hundred years since 1907: changes in the historiography of major subjects of American history and alterations in the school and college history curricula. The issue engages these themes with articles by such noted scholars as Sean Wilentz, Gary Kornblith, Carol Lasser, Emily Rosenberg, David Hollinger, and Diane Ravitch.

What decades these ten have been, what changes they have seen. A gambler would be justified in laying heavy odds that, could they return to life, the historians of the United States alive and at work in 1907—some of them founders of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA), the original name of today’s OAH—would not recognize what their discipline had become one hundred years later. Some of these resurrected men (all men then, which of course is part of the story) would guess not incorrectly, as Wilentz makes clear in his essay in the issue, that the history of the national state, its politics, and its leading figures would continue to pique historians’ interests. None would be surprised to find a few of their contemporaries, like Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard, figuring so prominently in the issue’s reports on the historiography of important segments of American history. But could they have anticipated the emergence of social history to its place of prominence in historians’ concerns, as Kornblith and Lasser present its development? Could they have imagined the challenges that would be thrown down to the ways they had conceived of narrating and understanding the place of the United States in the world—challenges laid out by Rosenberg? Could they easily grasp the enlargement of subjects, whose story Hollinger narrates, that have fallen under the umbrella of American intellectual history? Would they not be astonished and troubled by the changes in—or, as Ravitch implicitly sees it, the degradation of—the history curriculum and its teaching in the schools? Would they recognize in today’s college curriculum, especially the rise to such prominence of American history, much of what their own institutions’ curricula once presented, as Julie Reuben relates that particular story? I doubt it.

For the plain fact of the matter is that the century since the founding in 1907 of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association has been one of extraordinary advances in historical knowledge, fresh ways of evaluating the past, altered curricular arrangements, and, of course, new media for the presentation of knowledge. These advances may not have been greater than those that preceded them in the previous century, but they have been broader and entirely different.

During the ten decades before 1907 (starting, that is, when Thomas Jefferson was president) the study of the past had slowly distinguished itself from moral philosophy, organized itself into a discipline as a distinct branch of knowledge with its own institutions, and begun to develop its enduring protocols of research, scholarship, teaching, and professional practice. By 1907, an increasing proportion of those who called themselves historians were being trained in university graduate schools, organizing themselves into learned societies and professional associations like the MVHA, creating the archival collections from which so much history has been written, interpreting documents in new ways, and setting out in pursuit of careers as professional historians in schools and colleges.

But in retrospect, as critical to the discipline as these developments were, they have been surpassed by what has occurred since then. Intellectually, history has become thick with distinct, often warring, interpretive themes and schools. As the authors of the articles in this issue make clear, the older, standard narratives of the major branches of historical knowledge have been built upon, supplemented, and challenged—where they have not simply been pushed aside. Broad new fields of inquiry, like the omnium gatherum that is now social history, have shouldered their way to great significance. In schools and colleges, the curriculum has splintered.

Why, one might ask, do we need to know the history of the major fields into which the discipline has come to be organized and how those fields are presented in school and college courses? Of what benefit is it to us and to our students? For one thing, such knowledge tells us where we entered the story and helps locate us in time and within the community of thought that constitutes a discipline and its constituent parts—knowing historiography locates us historically. In addition, having that knowledge helps us understand our own thinking—how we came to have the views about the past that we do and how, were we to choose to do so, we might alter or escape from those views. For our students, it is essential that they see historical knowledge and understanding not as something fixed but as information given meaning by human beings located in time and culture. Understanding is additive and, like geological strata, is tossed upon and mixed up with earlier sedimentary knowledge. As we help our students view the past—and the present, too—in new ways, they come to see that there exist various ways, many of them complementary and mutually enriching, to understand their own lives and that of their forebears.

Allotted more space, I would have sought coverage by additional authors of additional subjects. Whatever the necessary limitations of the April issue of the Magazine of History, all of its elements stand on their own as penetrating overviews of their particular subjects. I have every confidence that readers will find them of use to themselves and to their students. 

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