From Zack Tobler

Townsend does a nice job of chronicling the development and creation of the subject of history.  I was surprising pleased with this work. In Townsends book, History's Babel, two points jump to mind for the creation of History as a actual subject in schools/universities. The first is that during the late 19th and early 20th century, as more people went to high school and even college it was almost seen as a civic duty to know and understand more about US/English history.  The emphasis on any other historical topic seemed crazy at the time, but I suppose that this was a step in the right direction... The other thing that I realized, foolishly too, is that many of the historical works, we written by "learned" men - one book that's comes to mind is Terry Roosevelt's book of the Naval History of the War of 1812.  While TR was be more then capable of putting together a interesting piece of work, Townsend writes about how there was not any historical discipline to the writing and documenting of history.  What were the primary source standards? How would original thoughts be documented? Things such as this, which today seem almost obvious to even the most casual student, needed to ironed our and agreed upon by the American Historical Association.  Even getting history as a separate subject, apart from economics or civics was a battle for the AHA.