Henry Adams and Francis Parkman

SINCE Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had lost even the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the experimental sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instructive than Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. Thus, in 1905, Adams chided his fellow historians in the Education, about fifteen years after he had completed his massive study of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Then he quickly made a few exceptions to his general condemnation: Sir Henry Maine, Tyler, McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who, from time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more scandalous.' The scandal to which Adams alluded was of course the notion that history was storytelling, while his mention of the experimental sciences suggested that history had meaning only if it provided generalizations so comprehensive as to apply to more than a particular sequence of events. His statement thus reflected the waged between socalled literary and scientific historians during the nineteenth century, if indeed battle does not state the situation too strongly. For, despite the antipathy of one school for the work of the other, the was more a series of skirmishes among individuals than a concerted action. Actually, no less than three groups, inharmonious among themselves if not mutually exclusive, fought under the banner of scientific history.2 Most scientific historians sought a method of objectifying and presenting data so as-in the well-known paraphrase of Ranke-to reveal

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• Henry Adams and the “Genteel Tradition” in American Historiography

  Edgardo Medeiros da Silva•Revue française d’études…•2019

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• Henry Adams and the “Genteel Tradition” in American Historiography

  Edgardo Medeiros da Silva•Revue française d’études…•2019

  Add to list