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The Howard University Department of History, 1913-1973
by Michael R. Winston
*excerpted with permission from the Howard University History Department
This account of sixty years of the Howard University Department of History is an attempt to place its evolution within the context of several broad developments, notably the professionalization of historical study as an academic subject, the history of Howard University, and the growth of racial self-consciousness in response to American patterns of race relations.
Despite great advances in our understanding of the historical experience of Negroes in the United States, too little known of the internal development of black institutions. This study is an attempt to close the gap in the general knowledge of one segment of the institutional history of black higher education. It also attempts to provide an analysis of the social and intellectual developments which affected the emergence of the largest and most significant group of Negro historians in the United States. The biographical sketches hopefully deepen our understanding of the personal and professional milieux in which they developed....
Historical Study at Howard University: The Era of the Classical Curriculum, 1867-1905
The study of history as a university subject was a relatively late development in the evolution of American higher education. There were, for example, only about twenty full-time teachers of history in more than four hundred colleges and universities in the United States in 1884. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the, there was a rapid increase in the number of university historians because of the progressive liberalization of the old classic curriculum to include history as well as, the newly emerging social sciences, which require specially trained teachers.1 In addition, the modernization of American universities into centers of research and graduate training along the lines of German universities, which began with the founding of The John Hopkins University in 1876, stimulated a trend for the professional ization of historical study. Moreover, the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884 was a decisive step in the transformation of historical writing from a preserve of gifted and often wealthy amateurs into discipline and profession.2
The emergence of history as a major academic enterprise at Howard University roughly parallels the pattern established at other American universities, but with several...