Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2013
Some years ago, I realized that I was the first historian of Germany hired in a tenure-track position at Amherst College. I got my job in 2000. Steeped in German history, I was surprised that a premier liberal arts college chose to hire a historian of Germany only at the very end of the twentieth century. My generation of historians of Germany often think—and other historians of Europe share our perception—that German history is a strong (if not the strongest) field in modern European history. Whether measured anecdotally by the number of job openings, the number of historians hired, the stream of published books, or the share of German history articles in academic journals, it always seems that German historians and German history are at the forefront. In fact, though, historians of Germany have always made up the smallest cohort of historians of the major European history fields (that also include British, Russian, and French history). According to the latest figures available from the American Historical Association (AHA), in 2010 there were 990 historians of Britain, 668 historians of Russia, 605 historians of France, and 592 historians of Germany in the United States.
1 For the purposes of this article, the modern period begins in 1750 for Britain and in 1789 for the continental countries. British history includes Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire. Modern Russian history includes the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union. Modern French history includes the French Empire. Modern German history includes German-speaking central Europe, including Habsburg history.
2 The AHA table includes all historians of a national history, not just historians of the modern era. The category of Germany in the AHA table covers historians who have self-identified as historians of Germany, but not those who have self-identified only as historians of Austria, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or central Europe. If German history is viewed more capaciously (as it is in this article), the AHA numbers may well be low.
3 In compiling this database, I included only advertisements for tenure-track positions in history departments in the United States. In addition, to get a more accurate count of the true number of jobs filled (as opposed to listings), I deleted a job advertisement if a virtually identical position was advertised by the same institution within the next four years. Given that advertised jobs are sometimes canceled or otherwise go unfilled, this was intended to avoid counting the same job twice. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate job postings listed between October 1969 and November 1971. During that period, the AHA published a separate Professional Register Bulletin; see “The Professional Register,” AHA Newsletter 8, no.1 (1969): 16Google Scholar. This publication is not listed in any catalog of serials. It also does not appear to be in the papers of the American Historical Association housed in the Library of Congress.
4 Krieger, Leonard, “European History in America,” in History, ed. Higham, John (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 243.Google Scholar
5 Palmer, R. R., “A Century of French History in America,” French Historical Studies 14 (1985): 163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Byrnes, Robert F., A History of Russian and East European Studies in the United States: Selected Essays (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 21.Google Scholar
7 Stern, Fritz, “German History in America, 1884–1984,” Central European History 19, no. 2 (1986): 135.Google Scholar
8 Krieger, “European History,” 266.
9 Ibid., 263–4.
10 For differing views on the origins of the Western Civilization course, see Allardyce, Gilbert, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (1982): 695–725Google Scholar; and Segal, Daniel A., “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 770–805.Google Scholar
11 Haskins, Charles H., “European History and American Scholarship,” American Historical Review 28, no. 2 (1923): 218–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Pinkney, David H., “American Historians on the European Past,” American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (1981): 2.Google Scholar
13 Higby, Chester P., “The Present Status of Modern European History in the United States,” Journal of Modern History 1, no. 1 (1929): 5–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Stern, “German History,” 150.
15 McNeill, William H., “A Birthday Note,” Journal of Modern History 51, no. 1 (1979): 1–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 Higby, “The Present Status,” 8.
17 McNeill, “A Birthday Note,” 3.
18 Krieger, “European History,” 269.
19 Ibid., 269.
20 McClelland, Charles E., “German Intellectual History,” Central European History 19, no. 2 (1986): 171.Google Scholar
21 Freeland, Richard M., “The World Transformed: A Golden Age for American Universities, 1945–1970,” in A History of Higher Education, ed. Goodchild, Lester F. and Wechsler, Harold S., 2nd ed. (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 1997), 590–93Google Scholar; and Geiger, Roger L., “Demography and Curriculum: The Humanities in American Higher Education from the 1950s through the 1980s,” in The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II, ed. Hollinger, David A. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 56–57.Google Scholar
22 Trow, Martin A., “American Higher Education: Past, Present, and Future,” in A History of Higher Education, ed. Goodchild and Wechsler, 572.Google Scholar
23 Gleason, Abbott, “Russian and Soviet Studies in the United States,” in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, vol. 32, ed. Wieczynski, Joseph L. (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1983), 47Google Scholar; Katz, Barry M., Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 9–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stern, “German History,” 157; and Winks, Robin W., Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York: Morrow, 1987), 85.Google Scholar
24 Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 94, 166, 190–91.
25 Report of the Harvard Committee, General Education in a Free Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 213–16.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., 213–16.
27 Bender, Thomas, “Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945–1995,” Daedalus 126, no. 1 (1997): 5.Google Scholar
28 Ibid., 4–5; Downs, Laura Lee and Gerson, Stéphane, “Introduction,” in Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination, ed. Downs, Laura Lee and Gerson, Stéphane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 9Google Scholar; Geiger, “Demography,” 57.
29 Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall,” 695.
30 Wellemeyer, J. F. Jr., “Survey of United States Historians, 1952, and a Forecast,” American Historical Review 61, no. 2 (1956): 340, 344.Google Scholar
31 Perkins, Dexter and Snell, John L., The Education of Historians in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 31.Google Scholar
32 Pinkney, “American Historians,” 3.
33 Woods, Randall Bennett, “Fulbright Internationalism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 491 (1987): 28.Google Scholar
34 Wellemeyer, “Survey,” 343–4.
35 Haynes, Douglas M., “White Lies: The British Past in Post-War America,” The History Teacher 31, no. 1 (1997): 96–97.Google Scholar
36 Cannadine, David, “British History: Past, Present—And Future?,” Past & Present 116 (1987): 174.Google Scholar
37 Michael Wolff's phrase, quoted in Vernon, James, “Historians and the Victorian Studies Question: Response,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 273.Google Scholar
38 McNeill, William H., “What's Happening to European History in the United States?,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123, no. 6 (1979): 341.Google Scholar
39 Pinkney, “American Historians,” 6.
40 Clark, J. C. D., “The Strange Death of British History? Reflections on Anglo-American Scholarship,” The Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997): 791.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
41 Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 139.
42 Ibid., 160.
43 Byrnes, A History, 122.
44 Ibid., 121.
45 Ibid., 130, 213.
46 Emmons, Terence, “Russia Then and Now in the Pages of the American Historical Review and Elsewhere: A Few Centennial Notes,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1995): 1142.Google Scholar
47 Engerman, David C., Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7.Google Scholar
48 In 1925, American medievalists founded the Medieval Academy of America and the journal Speculum. McNeill, “A Birthday Note,” 1.
49 Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 38.
50 Ibid., 38–39.
51 Ibid., 3.
52 Bonnell, Victoria E. and Breslauer, George W., “Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. Szanton, David (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 223–4.Google Scholar
53 Gleason, “Russian and Soviet Studies,” 51.
54 Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 7.
55 See ibid., 156–64.
56 Emmons, “Russia Then and Now,” 1144–5.
57 Ibid., 1146.
58 See Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 286–308.
59 Emmons, “Russia Then and Now,” 1147.
60 McNeill, “What's Happening?,” 341.
61 Barkin, Kenneth D., “German Émigré Historians in America: The Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies,” in An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933, ed. Lehmann, Hartmut and Sheehan, James J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153–4.Google Scholar
62 Berghahn, Volker, “Deutschlandbilder 1945–1965. Angloamerikanische Historiker und moderne deutsche Geschichte,” in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (1945–1965), ed. Schulin, Ernst (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 251.Google Scholar
63 On the older generation of refugee historians, see Epstein, Catherine, A Past Renewed: A Catalog of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Lehmann and Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past.
64 McNeill, “What's Happening?,” 342.
65 Popkin, Jeremy D., “The American Historian of France and the ‘Other,’” in Objectivity and Its Other, ed. Natter, Wolfgang, Schatzki, Theodore R., and Jones, John Paul III (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 98.Google Scholar
66 See Philipp Stelzel, “Rethinking Modern German History: Critical Social History as a Transatlantic Enterprise, 1945–1989” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010).
67 Krieger, “European History,” 303.
68 This was in contrast to German historians in Germany, who long viewed German exceptionalism in a positive light.
69 Stern, “German History,” 160.
70 Steven Aschheim and Jeffrey Herf have argued that the intellectual preoccupations of Stern and Mosse (as well as Peter Gay and Walter Laqueur) paved the way for historians of Germany to look at the Holocaust as the defining moment in German history. See Aschheim, Steven E., Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 49Google Scholar; and Herf, Jeffrey, “How the Culture Wars Matter: Liberal Historiography, German History, and the Jewish Catastrophe,” in Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities, ed. Bérubé, Michael and Nelson, Cary (New York: Routledge, 1995), 152.Google Scholar
71 Smith, Helmut Walser, “The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on Perspective,” History & Memory 17, nos. 1/2 (2005): 283.Google Scholar
72 See the description of a class with the refugee historian Hans Rosenberg in Hilberg, Raul, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996): 58–59.Google Scholar
73 Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 60.
74 Novick, Peter, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 103–23.Google Scholar
75 Berghahn, Volker and Maier, Charles S., “Modern Europe in American Historical Writing,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 394.Google Scholar
76 See the website of the American Council of Learned Societies, http://www.acls.org/societies/societies.aspx?sid=ef4ab5cb-ee16-dc11-9d54-000c2903e717 (accessed August 4, 2011).
77 Berenson, Edward and Green, Nancy L., “The Society for French Historical Studies: The Early Years,” French Historical Studies 28, no. 4 (2005): 581.Google Scholar
78 In 2012, CGCEH changed its name to the Central European History Society (CEHS). For a short history of the CGCEH, see the CEHS website, https://www.centraleuropeanhistory.org (accessed September 14, 2012).
79 Sylvain Quatravaux, Embassy of France, to author, July 25, 2011.
80 “NACBS Report on the State and Future of British Studies in North America (1999),” posted at http://www.nacbs.org/archive/nacbs-report-on-the-state-and-future-of-british-studies/ (accessed September 20, 2012); and the “External Funding” section of the website of the North American Conference on British Studies, http://www.nacbs.org/prizes/external-funding/ (accessed September 20, 2012).
81 AHA Newsletter 1, no. 1 (1962).Google Scholar
82 The remaining seventy-six jobs were a smattering of openings in southern history (Italy, Spain), Balkan history, or combinations of countries (France/Germany, Britain/Russia, and so on).
83 “Jobs for Historians and the Role of the AHA: Two Comments Delivered at the Annual Meeting,” AHA Newsletter 10, no. 2 (1972): 20.Google Scholar
84 Ibid., 19.
85 Geiger, “Demography,” 65.
86 American Historical Association, Survey of the Historical Profession: Academia 1981–82 Summary Report (Washington, D.C.: AHA, 1984), 5.Google Scholar
87 McNeill, William H., “Modern European History,” in Kammen, Michael, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980): 97.Google Scholar
88 Vernon, James, “The Local, the Imperial, and the Global: Repositioning Twentieth-Century Britain and the Brief Life of its Social Democracy,” Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 3 (2010): 406.Google Scholar
89 Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 440.Google Scholar
90 “NACBS Report.”
91 Berenson, Edward, “France, a Political Romance,” in Why France?, ed. Downs and Gerson, 138.Google Scholar
92 Chapman, Herrick, “Choosing History, Discovering France,” in Why France?, ed. Downs and Gerson, 156.Google Scholar
93 Hunt, Lynn, “Fantasy Meets Reality: A Midwesterner Goes to Paris,” in Why France?, ed. Downs and Gerson, 63.Google Scholar
94 Gordon, Bertram M., “The Decline of a Cultural Icon: France in American Perspective,” French Historical Studies 22, no. 4 (1999): 625.Google Scholar
95 Smith, Leonard V., “Writing at the Margins,” in Why France?, ed. Downs and Gerson, 180.Google Scholar
96 Pinkney, David H., “The Dilemma of the American Historian of Modern France,” French Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (1958): 11–25Google Scholar; and Pinkney, David H., “The Dilemma of the American Historian of Modern France Reconsidered,” French Historical Studies 9 (1975): 170–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
97 Palmer, “A Century of French History,” 171–72.
98 Kuisel, Richard F., “American Historians in Search of France: Perceptions and Misperceptions,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (1995): 312–14.Google Scholar
99 Popkin, “The American Historian,” 103.
100 Pinkney, David H., “Time to Bury the Pinkney Thesis?,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 219–23.Google Scholar
101 Sewell, William H. Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 23.Google Scholar
102 Popkin, “The American Historian,” 104.
103 Kselman, Thomas, “Catholic Connections, Jewish Relations, French Religion,” in Why France?, ed. Downs and Gerson, 116.Google Scholar
104 Sewell, Jr., Logics, 40.
105 Ibid., 51.
106 On historians of Russia not following the “linguistic turn,” see Emmons, “Russia Then and Now,” 1148.
107 Herf, “How the Cultural Wars Matter,” 155.
108 Cannadine, “British History,” 184.
109 Hunt, Lynn, “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History 21, no. 2 (1986): 220.Google Scholar
110 Schaeper, Thomas J., “French History as Written on Both Sides of the Atlantic: A Comparative Analysis,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 236.Google Scholar
111 Ibid., 236.
112 Smith, Michael S., “French History in the College Curriculum: Survey Results,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 226, 230.Google Scholar
113 Jarausch, Konrad H., “German Social History: American Style,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 2 (1985): 354.Google Scholar
114 Ibid., 350.
115 McClelland, “German Intellectual History,” 164–5.
116 Jarausch, “German Social History,” 354.
117 Novick, The Holocaust, 209.
118 Haynes, Stephen R., “Holocaust Education at American Colleges and Universities: A Report on the Current Situation,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 288.Google Scholar
119 Littell, Marcia Sachs, “Breaking the Silence: A History of Holocaust Education in America,” in Remembrance, Repentance, Reconciliation: The 25th Anniversary Volume of the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, ed. Tobler, Douglas F. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), 197.Google Scholar
120 Ibid., 197–8.
121 By 1980, estimates of the number of Holocaust courses ranged from “over 700” to “approximately 140.” S. Haynes, “Holocaust Education,” 283, 287–8.
122 Engel, David, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 34.Google Scholar
123 Fallace, Thomas D., “The Origins of Holocaust Education in American Public Schools,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20, no. 1 (2006): 84.Google Scholar
124 Haynes, “Holocaust Education,” 302.
125 Ibid., 302.
126 Ibid., 284.
127 Engel, Historians, 23.
128 Ibid., 32.
129 Since 1981, twenty-three job ads in modern European history asked for expertise in the Holocaust. Of these, fourteen were in German history, one in Jewish history, two in German-Jewish history, and six made no reference to a national history.
130 On the popularity of Holocaust courses, see Engel, Historians, 19; and Haynes, “Holocaust Education,” 286, 299.
131 Engel, Historians, 239 note 92.
132 See H. W. Smith, “The Vanishing Point,” 269–95.
133 Ibid., 288.
134 See Stone, Dan, “Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War,” Patterns of Prejudice 44, no. 5 (2010): 454–68.Google Scholar
135 Robert B. Townsend, “Job Market Sagged Further in 2009–10,” Perspectives on History (January 2011), at http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2011/1101/1101new1.cfm (accessed August 15, 2011).
136 Kevin M. Sweeney to David Ratner, March 16, 1999, personal collection of author.
137 “NACBS Report.”
138 Ibid.
139 Ibid.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid.
142 Pedersen, Susan, “Money, Space, and Time: Reflections on Graduate Education,” part of “Roundtable: Twentieth-Century British History in North America,” Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 3 (2010): 387.Google Scholar
143 Bonnell and Breslauer, “Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies,” 231.
144 Ibid., 227.
145 Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 335.
146 Emmons, “Russia Then and Now,” 1145–6.
147 From the Editors, “Ten Years after the ‘Remarkable Decade,’” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 4 (2011): 770Google Scholar. See the full issue for an overview of recent historiographical developments in Russian/Soviet history. For a similar overview published in 2001, see Kritika 2, no. 2 (2001).Google Scholar
148 Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 335.
149 Ibid., 333, 431 note 1.
150 Stone, “Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome,’” 466–7.
151 Goldstein, Jan, “The Future of French History in the United States: Unapocalyptic Thoughts for the New Millennium,” French Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (2001): 5.Google Scholar
152 See Gordon, “The Decline of a Cultural Icon,” 625–51.
153 Ibid., 625–6.
154 Evans, Richard J., Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16–17Google Scholar. For a debate about this work, see these essays in Contemporary European History 20, no. 3 (2011)Google Scholar: Peter Baldwin, “Smug Britannia: The Dominance of (the) English in Current History Writing and Its Pathologies,” 351–66; Richard J. Evans, “Response to Baldwin,” 367–76; and Peter Baldwin, “Response to Evans, 377–80.
155 On the alleged success of the attack on Eurocentrism, see Gräser, Marcus, “World History in a Nation-State: The Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in the United States,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (2009): 1043.Google Scholar
156 Because the AHA did not begin job advertisements until 1962 and many institutions did not advertise with it, the documented number of available positions in the 2000s exceeded that of the 1960s (see Table 3).
157 Townsend, Robert B., “Decline of the West or the Rise of the Rest? Data from 2010 Shows Rebalancing of Field Coverage in Departments,” Perspectives on History 49, no. 6 (2011)Google Scholar at http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2011/1109/1109pro1.cfm (accessed September 19, 2012).
158 Ibid.
159 Ibid.
160 Ibid.
161 Ibid.
162 Ibid.
163 Pedersen, “Money,” 384–5.
164 Goldstein, “The Future of French History,” 3.
165 Pedersen, “Money,” 389.
166 Spiegel, Gabrielle M., “The Case for History and the Humanities,” Perspectives on History 46, no. 1 (2008): 3–4.Google Scholar
