Professionalization, Access, and Exclusion: Tales from the Other Side of Babel

At its inception, the American Historical Association was filled with elite, white Victorian “gentleman scholars” whose interests and blindness would shape the history of history in America. As these men both defined who was a historian and what history was, they built their assumptions into the AHAs emerging leadership structure. Between 1884 and 1979, the AHA’s leadership emphasized professionalization of the discipline within the academy and academic scholarship. Implicit in the understanding of professionalization, however, was the exclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, and anyone outside the network of men trained at a few select universities. While a few women had sat on the council, they were few in number and limited in their influence. In response to these exclusions, Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, women formed the Berkshire Conference on Women History, and Catholics started the Catholic Historical Association. These groups had their own parallel journals and conferences that paralleled the AHA.

This paper seeks to understand what the AHA lost by adhering to the assumptions of its earlier leadership practices. It asks how did early twentieth-century ideas about professionalization limit the AHAs and the AHRs vision of what and who could do history.