Scientific History as a Teaching Method: The Formative Years
TOWARD the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when history departments and graduate programs were being organized in the leading American colleges and universities, and American historians were founding their first professional associations and journals, something called "scientific history" emerged in the United States. This is a development so familiar to the student of historiography that it seems to require little further discussion. But successfully labelling a phenomenon is by no means equivalent to satisfactorily explaining it, and scientific history, though widely talked about, has yet to be fully understood. The most authoritative analysis to date is to be found in John Higham's History.' Higham explores the philosophy of the scientific historians, their writings, and their place in the historical profession as well as in the larger stream of American culture. He discredits the long-standing myth that the scientific historians thought themselves capable of com-