Making Medieval History in Modern America: The Long Shadow of Herbert Baxter Adams’s History and Politics

The context, writings, and ambitions of Herbert Baxter Adams offers a formative case-study to begin to trace out some of the effects of embedding claims to the “scientific” study of history and politics in a medieval past. As a so-called founder of modern history in the US and one the first professor of History and Politics at Hopkins to train students (including Charles Homer Haskins) formally for a Ph.D. in History in America, Adams shaped the discipline in profound and public ways. His ideas set the course for the development of professional history in the US and fostered a set of interpretative models and assumptions that also dictated how medieval history was studied on this side of the Atlantic. Moreover, he generated a dynamic that made the medieval relevant to the US present by linking the study of the medieval past to political institution and legal and constitutional sources which had a two-pronged effect, both limiting what constituted legitimate topics in medieval history, and yoking professional study of the past to present politics in ways that would have far reaching consequences for interpretations of nationalism and democracy.