The Windowless Room of the Present: Rereading David Harlan

This essay unearths the guiding question of David Harlan’s 1997 book, The Degradation of American History. While most commentators have focused their attention on Harlan’s biting criticism of the historical profession, this essay argues that Harlan’s diatribe against historical scholarship pursued “for its own sake” stems from a deep concern about the moral education of citizens in an age that François Hartog and others typify as “presentist.” Although Harlan’s remedies against presentism are found wanting, the essay argues that the question raised in The Degradation of American History is a relevant, timely, and still unresolved one, now even more than at the time of the book’s original publication.

American Urban History

American urban history embraces all historiography related to towns, cities, and metropolitan regions in the United States. American urban history includes the examination of places, processes, and ways of life through a broad and diverse range of themes including immigration, migration, population distribution, economic and spatial development, politics, planning, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Urban history emerged as an identifiable subfield of United States history in the mid-20th century, admittedly well after the establishment of similar areas of inquiry in other professional fields and academic disciplines, particularly sociology. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, a small number of academics, led by noted social historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., commenced the first wave of scholarly interest in American urban history with works on colonial seaports and select 19th-century cities. By the 1950s, urban history coalesced as a recognizable subfield around a reformulation of American history, emphasizing the establishment of towns, rather than the pursuit of agriculture, as the spearhead for the formation and growth of the nation. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a second round of interest in American urban history, set against the backdrop of the tremendous political and social changes that swept the nation and transformed the historical profession. Through innovative models of scholarship that broke with traditional consensus history, notably pioneering quantitative research methods, a self-identified “new urban history” emerged that emphasized spatial development as well as social, economic, and political mobility, conflict, and change. Over time, this new urban history was largely subsumed within social history, given the fields’ intersecting and overlapping interests in social and political issues viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Social history’s broad focus resulted in an explosion of scholarship that all but dominated the American historical profession by the late 20th century. From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, books with urban settings and themes, most of them well within the camp of social history, won an impressive number of Bancroft prizes and other prestigious awards. Urban history itself has survived—even thrived—without a widely agreed upon canon or dominant research methodology. Scholars continue to make significant contributions to urban history, whether or not they embrace the title of urbanist. Note that attendance at the biannual meetings of the Urban History Association has grown significantly over the last two decades. The sources in this article’s twenty subject headings have been arranged to illustrate the depth and breadth of each prominent theme in the field and are by no means an exhaustive list of such scholarship, but rather a sampling of the most influential and innovative examinations of America’s urban canvas.

The Rise of African American Intellectual History

This essay makes a decisive turn to the history and historiography of African American intellectual history, a field of study long relegated to the margins of the general field of US intellectual history. Its principal intention is to reflect on the origins, growth, and recent institutionalization of African American intellectual history while showing the relationship between those developments and broader trends within the US and, at times, European historical profession. This framework is meant as a corrective. African American intellectual history is a distinctive field with its own origins, objectives, and methods. Yet it also demands centering within US and global intellectual history. Marginalized for too long, African American intellectual history has long proposed and advanced innovative ways of doing and conceptualizing intellectual history. I suggest that this burgeoning field has important, generalizable lessons about the practice and possibilities of intellectual history writ large.

The Late Chosŏn Korean Catholic Archives: Documenting this World and the Next

Archives typically consist of documents created for this-worldly purposes, such as government census records. In contrast, the Korean Catholic archives consist of documents created primarily for the purposes of salvation (documents such as prayer books and lives of the saints) or for sainthood (documents showing that a particular person died a martyr). Moreover, many of these documents were international collaborations produced by Korean Catholics and foreign missionaries, who at times even utilized sources created by the government that persecuted them. Many documents were sent to Europe, enabling them to survive anti-Catholic persecution and making Europe the center of Korean Catholic archives. However, beginning in the 1960s, institutions based on the peninsula, such as the Research Foundation of Korean Church History, worked to make Korea itself a center of archives and knowledge production. In so doing, Korean Catholics sought to make these materials available to non-Catholic audiences and follow secular standards of the historical profession while trying to develop an authentically Catholic way of understanding their history. This article will trace this history and also act as introduction to these archives for scholars interested in utilizing them.

Are Folk Museums Still Relevant?

During the 1970s the folk, or open-air, museum was hailed as a revolutionary change in museology and a great opportunity for folklorists to exert influence on public education about regional-ethnic-occupational traditions and a changing historical profession. With the advent of the digital age these museums are struggling to bring visitors in and folklorists have had an uneasy relationship with predominantly rural museums. This chapter advocates for a different kind of folk museum that is action rather than object focused, looks to industrial and post-industrial interpretation, and engages integrative programming to respond to needs of local communities.

Introduction

This introduction gives on overview of the sub-discipline of naval history since its emergence in the early eighteenth-century. It outlines the various social, cultural and political influences that have shaped the subject over the past three centuries, and discusses its relationship with the wider historical profession. The second half of the introduction sums up the current state of naval history, describing the many historiographies that now have a bearing on how the subject is conducted. Each contribution to the volume is introduced in this context, offering a precis of the chapters that follow.