My War with the AHA.

For the past twenty-three years I have been a practicing historian in three different academic departments, and during that time I have had an intermittent, generally difficult relationship with my professional organization, the American Historical Association. Were this story merely of personal interest I would keep it to myself, but I am persuaded that it is not. My various dealings with the AHA, which have now come to an end, illustrate the direction the historical profession has taken during the last twenty years, and the extent to which the association now belongs to a very narrow ideological group, quite intolerant of those who do not share their approaches. My experience is, I know, anything but unique, and it therefore deserves the attention of a wider audience, most of whom have no idea what is going on within the humanities today.

It was relatively early in my career, in 1983 I believe, that I first decided to propose a panel at the annual meeting of the association. Having published my first book in 1980, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, I had returned to one of the most controversial issues in European history, the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War, and I had had an article with a somewhat new view of Germany's responsibility accepted by the Journal of Modern History. That has been a leading journal on this issue since its founding in the 1920s. I thought it might be the basis for one paper on a panel on new views of the outbreak of the war. For the other papers I recruited William C. Fuller, Jr., the author of a book on Russian civil-military relations in the late imperial period, and Douglas Porch, who had already published several books on the French army in the early twentieth century. (The AHA did not yet have a rule, later adopted, that any panel submitted had to include women as well as men.) With Germany, France, and Russia covered by established young scholars (we were all in our thirties at that time), and having recruited another well-known authority on the period, Joachim Remak, to chair the panel, I didn't see how we could miss.

I was wrong. Upon receiving notice that our panel had been rejected, I called the then-chairman of the program committee, whom I knew slightly, to ask what had happened. He replied that a member of the committee had argued vehemently that no one could possibly have anything new to say about 1914. Since various leading university presses had reached the opposite conclusion about our work, I was shocked, but there was nothing that I could do. Already busy with additional projects, I more or less put the issue out of my mind. Only later did I realize that this was, in its own way, a significant event in the history of my profession.

Essentially, a trend has developed over the last three decades not merely in favor of writing the history of hitherto neglected groups, including the poor, minorities, and women, but actively against writing the history of governments and their role in society or abroad. Exactly why this has happened is a complex question. Professional humanists are, alas, always eager for new approaches, since they help provide new generations of graduate students with dissertation topics. The new areas of study matched the political interests of a new generation of historians who sympathized instinctively with the disadvantaged, as, indeed, I always have myself. More recently, as we shall see, the new emphasis has become connected to a new methodology that explicitly militates against studying white males, who, for better or for worse, have dominated modern Western governments. And lastly, traditional but liberal historians like myself took a sympathetic view of the new history as a means of rounding out the profession, not realizing that it was instead likely to transform it entirely from the discipline to which we had decided to devote our lives.

Now, as we enter a new century, many fine historians are still writing excellent political and diplomatic history, but one would never know it from any of the recent programs of the AHA convention, one of which I now hold in my hand. Out of 149 panels, the index lists only eleven on politics and four on diplomacy and foreign policy, but even this is misleading. Only three of the panels listed on politics deal with what governments did, rather than with what various people thought about politics, and only one of the four panels on diplomacy and foreign policy does. Only four out of 149 panels, in other words, deal with the concrete workings of governments, the institutions that exercise the most power over the lives of their citizens. Meanwhile, the index lists fifteen panels on "culture," thirteen on "identity," sixteen on "race," ten on "religion," and nine on "women." Every year on H-Diplo, a bulletin board for diplomatic historians, people raise this issue, and every year the AHA program committee claims that its distribution of panels reflects the distribution of proposals submitted. If that is true, it can only mean that political and diplomatic historians have been effectively intimidated or discouraged from taking part.

Like so many other more traditional historians of a relatively liberal political bent, I was slow to realize what was happening around me. I became more interested in the early 1990s, partly because I left my university position to teach at the Naval War College in Newport--probably the leading center in the world for the study of diplomacy and war--and partly because of the publication of several important polemics by my contemporary, Camille Paglia, who has also made her career on the fringes of academia. My next skirmish with the association began with the 1992 publication--actually, republication--in Perspectives, the AHA newsletter, of an article by Professor Joan Scott, a leading feminist historian at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, rifled "The New University: Beyond Political Correctness." Attacking conservative critics of trends in the humanities, Professor Scott endorsed the idea that arguments over knowledge were really about the interests of groups rather than the opinions of individuals, and that our traditional view of the world had been "constructed" by white males determined to universalize their own experience at others' expense. Versions of the same article had already been published elsewhere, but the AHA council urged "careful consideration of the points raised by Dr. Scott in the accompanying article."

That article drew a measured rejoinder about six months later by Professor Jerry Z. Muller of Catholic University, who borrowed a phrase from her article and rifled his response, "Challenging Political Correctness: A 'Paranoid Hysteric' Replies to Joan Scott." Muller argued that professional history was replete with examples of brilliant writing about some groups by members of others, and that Scott's contention that "intellectual life is merely a mask for the will to power of particular groups" was itself profoundly anti-intellectual. He also pointed out that out of nineteen candidates then nominated for AHA offices, five worked in class and labor issues, ten in women's or gender history issues, and seven in racial issues, while none worked in economic history, international relations, military history, or history of science. Professor Scott, in a very brief reply, simply affirmed that Professor Muller Was a "paranoid hysteric" and referred to the "anti-intellectualism" of Camille Paglia, among others, whom I already regarded as one of the most original thinkers of my generation.