Scholarship in all fields of historical study remains strong. The range of those fields displays a rooted cosmopolitanism, covering once understudied non-Western portions of the globe and based on deep and often imaginative 鈥� but not imaginary 鈥� archival research. At their best, gatherings of historians feature a diversity of methods and interpretations that correct impressions of an academic field in crisis, riven by obsessions with ethnic, racial, or gender identity, contemptuous of the search for truth as an oppressive power play.
Here is one illustrative anecdote: Recently, one of us attended a conference held at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress devoted to J. Franklin Jameson and the centenary of his brief but remarkable book, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. By one familiar standard, Jameson is the epitome of a dead white male historian, whose greatest contributions lay in his institution building (at the American Historical Review and the Carnegie Endowment as well as the Library of Congress), and his editorial work, notably on the papers of John C. Calhoun. Yet as the conference organizers pointed out, his little book on the Revolution has not fallen out of print since its initial publication in 1926. Interest in Jameson鈥檚 effort to expand the canvas beyond familiar renditions of political affairs and military maneuvers has endured. And for this conference, Jameson鈥檚 work inspired papers in intellectual, political, legal, cultural history and more, devoted to topics that included the Black abolitionist memory of the American Revolution, money and the American Revolution, Native American expropriation and the Revolution, women鈥檚 labor and the Revolutionary economy, and the antislavery revolution inside the Revolution.
The topics reflected, to be sure, how much the study of American history has changed over the last century. It is unclear, for instance, whether Jameson thought that women had much of a history, let alone one worth studying. Still, participants could appreciate the genealogy that connected their work with Jameson鈥檚 book, not least its discussions of slavery. Interest in topics other than strictly political or military history is far more prevalent today than in 1925 鈥� a matter worth further consideration 鈥� but that interest is nothing new. And while there was no unanimity in interpretation among the conference participants about the Revolution itself, there was recognition, beyond a basic spirit of scholarly comity, that everyone was trying as hard as possible to bring evidence to bear on arriving at something approximating the truth.[1] And this reflected one of the fundamental tenets of the historical discipline, that there is such a thing as recoverable truth and the historian鈥檚 basic task is to recover it.
We are inclined to think that this kind of historical work and exchange represents the great preponderance of what American historians are up to. Nothing we have to say about the field should detract from its strengths and its richness. Nevertheless, historians, like other scholars in the humanities and adjacent social sciences, have faced challenges that represent not so much a slip in scholarly standards as a change in kind. As these challenges date back half a century and more, we believe, as historians, that they are best understood historically. We do so at the risk of appearing to rehash what, to many of our colleagues, will appear like old news, but with the conviction that to comprehend where our field stands, we need to comprehend how we got here. As will quickly become obvious, we have not limited ourselves to writings by historians based in the United States, given the cosmopolitan influences in the field we mentioned earlier.
Given the limits of time and the complexity of the assignment we agreed to undertake, we offer this report as provisional and incomplete, a starting point for debate and reflection. It is itself a reflection, in response to the assignment that we took up, and is not, in any way, intended as a comprehensive survey of our discipline. There are important questions about the current emphases and the future direction of historical studies that we have mentioned but left open for further inquiry, and others that we have left untouched. Without question, our accounts and descriptions will provoke dissent. Although based on an enormous literature about recent historiography, this report is in some ways 鈥� unavoidably 鈥� a deeply personal document. On some matters of importance, we have elected to be frankly impressionistic in order to raise questions rather than say nothing at all. Above all, we are interested in describing the evolution of a field in which we believe, despite numerous challenges and abiding tensions, the center has held. The best we can hope for is to stimulate open and candid assessments of and discussions about where historical studies fit into the current state of the humanities.
1 For a program of the conference, 鈥淛ameson 100: A Celebration and Re-Examination,鈥� held at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress,
November 20-21, 2025, see