The Price of Professionalization: Losing History Teaching, 1895–1940

This paper will revisit the development of separate professional identities for historians in academia and precollegiate history teachers in the early twentieth century. In contrast to current historiography, which attributes the current separation between academic history and history teaching either to the intrusion of malign forces ("educationists") or overt neglect by academics, this paper attributes the change to the separate professionalization processes taking place in each sphere. This paper will focus primarily on the American Historical Association's Committee of Seven (1895 to 1898) and Commission on the Social Studies (1928 to 1934) as barometers for analysis.