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The Adolescent Road to Historical Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Bonnie G. Smith
Bonnie G. Smith*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

The future historian John Lothrop Motley, aged ten in 1824, wrote to his father from boarding school outside Boston: “I want to see you very much. I suppose you remember that it is my turn to come home on Saturday next? This is Thursday, the day on which we speak. I was third best…. My nose has bled very often lately, but I believe it will not bleed much more. I have had a pain in my side once or twice.” Motley's education involved intensive training in languages as part of a curriculum consisting of linguistic drill and a bit of math and science, which did not satisfy his growing thirst for reading. “In the morning, from half-past five to seven, I study French,” Motley wrote his mother a year later, “after breakfast I study Spanish, from nine to half past ten, when we go out and stay about ten or fifteen minutes; and when we come in, I study Greek until twelve, when we are dismissed; and in the afternoon I study Cicero and recite to Dr. Beck, a German.” Two years later Motley complained about the lack of reading material, asking his father for books and announcing the organization of a reading room by one of the masters. But the reading room failed to satisfy him, Motley explained to his brother, because no one contributed books and the few newspapers there were all “a hundred years old” and all mutilated within an hour of being deposited. “Reading is not to be thought of, as there are no books in school.”

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 563 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 John Lothrop Motley to his father, 13 May 1824, Motley to his mother, 31 May 1825, and Motley to his brother, 26 July 1829, in The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, ed. Curtis, George William (New York, 1889), 1:1, 5, 8.Google Scholar

2 Quoted by David Kennedy at Advanced Placement European History Conference, Vancouver, B.C., 16 Oct. 1992. For other examples of Collingwood's discussion of manliness, see Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography (London, 1951), 114–15.Google Scholar

3 On this point, see Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (New York, 1962), 95–102; Fabian, Johannes, “Language, History, and Anthropology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1 (1971): 19–47; and Allan Megill's important and clarifying introduction to the idea of the construction of historical objects in “Four Senses of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship 8 (1991): 307–10. My article takes a different tack from that of Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), first in seeing the development of scientific history as evolving over the century rather than interpreting it as concerning the question of objectivity alone as it was developed by American professional historians at the very end of the nineteenth century. Novick argues that these latter men railed against the practices of Motley, Bancroft, et al., but for several centuries historians have railed against the scientific shortcomings of their predecessors. Unlike Novick, then, I include people like Motley who did archival research, had seminary training, and so on; I also consider historians such as Hippolyte Taine, who were concerned with issues of science although they ventured into fields such as literature and culture. Still further, this paper includes historians such as Macaulay, who as Peter Gay points out had a real historicist sensibility. Gay, , Style in History (New York, 1974), 122. Google Scholar

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9 Paulsen, , Autobiography, 148; letter to Selina Mills Macaulay, 17 Mar. 1813, and to Zachary Macaulay, 23 Mar. 1813, in Letters of Macaulay, ed. Pinney, , 1: 22, 23; Lavisse, , Souvenirs, 216. Google Scholar

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13 Letter to his mother, 1 July 1832, in Correspondence of Motley, ed. Curtis, , 1:20–21.Google Scholar

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18 Megill, , “Four Senses”; letter to his parents, 15 Nov. 1794, in Life and Letters of Niebuhr, ed. Hensler, , 1:48; Taine, Hippolyte, Correspondance (Paris, 1902), 1: 24 (quotation is in the “Introduction” to an unfinished manuscript on “La destinée humaine,” which Taine wrote as a youth); letter to Prévost-Paradol, 2 Mar. 1849, in ibid., 1: 51. Google Scholar

19 Letter to Dora Hensler, 6 Sep. 1797, and letter to his parents, 7 Nov. 1794, in Life and Letters of Niebuhr, ed. Hensler, , 1:84, 47.Google Scholar

20 Green, J. R., A Short History of the English People (New York, 1884), iii.Google Scholar

21 The author thanks Barbara Herrnstein Smith for her suggestions about the adolescent experience of young historians. Her suggested revisions have been incorporated in this paragraph.Google Scholar