Familiarity and Disappointment

From a purely content perspective, Townsend’s History’s Babel was an interesting accounting of the history of the study of history from the 1880s to the 1940s.  On the conceptual side, I took away two items.

First, Townsend’s work demonstrated that the professionalization of the study of history paralleled that of other fields.  As a former student of public administration, I found myself in familiar territory when Townsend related the beginnings of the scientific approach based on a German model at the expense of the older literary methods (p. 20).  For it was at the same time that Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Princeton, was formulating his writings on the value of bureaucracy based on the theories developed by the German sociologist, Max Weber.  It came as no surprise to me as I progressed through the book that the history profession would fragment into specialized functions.    

Second, I was profoundly disappointed, although not surprised, that the history profession fell into the same trap as the field of public administration.  The specialization of the subfields of academia, research, archival collections, and secondary teaching from the late 1920s to 1940 and the subsequent “stovepipe” mentality appears to be a natural progression for the professionalization of a field of study.  While in the field of public administration this is a somewhat necessary evil for an enormous government bureaucracy to function, it seems out of place in regards to history.  The bureaucratic machine seems to swallow the humanity that is so desperately needed to study history from the perspective of those that lived it.  One example of this dilemma is the disengagement of teachers from history in and around 1913, where pedagogic studies became a distant secondary concern to educational training (p.116).  In this case and as a whole, the study of history in its purest form seems to have been steamrolled in order to benefit the furthering of the history profession.