Syracuse University and the American Historical Association hosted an international gathering of scholars at a conference focused on the development of the historical discipline from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The conference, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and the university, with assistance from the AHA, drew from nine countries. The AHA was represented by its executive director. In keeping with its theme, papers dealt with the place of Leopold von Ranke in the development of history as an academic discipline and the climate within which these changes occurred.
The re-evaluation of the work of Ranke, undertaken in a number of distinguished works published in the last twenty years, formed one of the underlying points of departure for the conference, which commemorated the centennial of the death of the great nineteenth-century historian. It was clear from papers, such as Wolfgang Mommsen’s on the German Neo-Rankeans and Dorothy Ross’s on the misunderstanding of Ranke in America, that historical scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century perceived Ranke in terms of its own agenda. Georg Iggers summed up the problem: “The times had changed and so had the structure of the modern world. Ranke had been too deeply rooted in a pre-democratic age.” Nevertheless, there was a fundamental recognition of the enduring contribution of Ranke, not merely through such great classics as his History of the Popes and Germany in the Age of the Reformation, as in Jaroslav Pelikan’s banquet address, but also through his emphasis on research in original sources and his role as a professor at the University of Berlin. Felix Gilbert’s discussion of Jacob Burckhardt as a student of Ranke sounded a theme heard more than once in the papers: Ranke’s historical vision went beyond the realm of States and their wars and politics to encompass the cultures of their peoples. Ernst Schulin used Ranke’s lecture notes to show how the great historian experimented with and strove after a view of European States as part of a universal history.
Of course, Leopold von Ranke was only one important figure among many, even though he may have been the most influential, in the emergence of history as an academic discipline in the universities and the schools. There was, in fact, a continuing debate over the nature of history that occupied scholars in Germany, France, England, America, and elsewhere. This debate very naturally influenced the distinctive curricular and intellectual role of history in each country, A number of important papers, including that of Peter Reill on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s historicism; Fritz Ringer’s on Bildung; and Hans Schleier’s on Droysen, Lorenz, and Bernheim; threw additional light on these discussions in Germany. Other papers, as in the case of Doris Goldstein on history at Oxford and Cambridge, examined the situation elsewhere. Again and again, the figure of Ranke emerged in contemporary discussions of the place that history ought to occupy in education.
Throughout the conference many points hearkened back to Peter Burke’s argument that the conservative Ranke cut off other promising developments in historiography and to Rudolf Vierhaus’s reminder of history’s unique suspension between science and art. Many invoked both of these images more than once. Indeed, those attending could not help but be struck by how funda mental many of these issues are to the contemporary discussion of history. The emergence of the “new historicism” has made these discussions not only more immediately relevant but also more necessary. The conviction that Ranke’s “impossible dream” of an objective historical study has set an agenda for practitioners of our craft is not merely alive but, to some degree, seems to be animating a revival of interest in history. Though not fully expressed, that view seems not to have been too far from the minds of many participants.
James M. Powell is Professor of History at Syracuse University.
