HISTORY AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE: Prospectuses of Historische Zeitschrift, Revue Historique, English Historical Review

Abstract

[By the mid-nineteenth century history had ceased to be a branch of literature and had become an academic discipline. Impressed by the example of the natural sciences, historians, especially in Germany, asserted that their craft too had become a science, and established an elaborate machinery of scholarship. Professional journals were founded in a format that has remained essentially unchanged to the present day, and the study of history in the Universities, a rarity at the end of the eighteenth century, became commonplace. At the same time the link between history and contemporary politics remained close, and it is no accident that the German and French historical reviews were begun at moments of great national stirrings.