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As local preservation societies opened their special collections to visitors around 1900, history teaching and research expanded in the USA as it had in England, France, Germany and Italy. ¹ John Franklin Jameson presided over the American Historical Association, edited the American Historical Review, directed the Department for Historical Research at the Carnegie Institute — otherwise devoted entirely to the natural sciences — and founded the Historical Manuscripts Commission. In other words, he did more than anybody to lead developments.² Jameson, aided by several other historians, in this way created the professional practice of history, which worked out of "love of civil and religious liberty" to train historians to create extensive documentary resources that subsequent generations could interpret. ³ Closure of the Carnegie Department and the end of Jameson's career in 1928, as well as an Association review of history teaching four years later, signalled regime change: monopolization by a small number of historians of syllabi looked terminal, and the scope of historical interpretation grew. ⁴ The coincidence of these alterations with publication of the first issues of Annales provides, therefore, an apposite time-frame in which to examine opposition to Berr and his circle.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137294982_8

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