ment about what constitutes quality and how to recognize it. The
contrast they draw with English literature could not be starker. Ac-
cording to one historian, in his field, “the disciplinary center holds.”
He explains:
History hasn’t been politicized in the way some fields have, in a
kind of roughly post-modern sort of approach to history. In the
wider field you get a range, but the range is reasonably narrow.
There are not so many people who would be writing in the lan-
guage that would seem empty jargon, [that would be dismissed as
a] bunch of junk by people who consider themselves empirical
historians. You don’t have such a dominant group of people who
are very engaged in cultural theory, who would just simply dis-
miss arbitrarily work that is narrowly empirical. The middle is
pretty big, pretty calm, not overtly politicized, and the ends I
think are relatively small. The idea that evidence does matter, that
giving attention to theory at the same time is a good thing: I think
both of those do probably hold.This peaceful state of affairs is not based on a notion that the field
is (or can be) unified around a common theory. Rather, in the opin-
ion of a particularly distinguished historian of early America, what
is shared is agreement on what constitutes good historical crafts-
manship, a sense of “careful archival work.” A European historian
concurs:
We are neither English, nor political science...Weseeourselves
as an interpretive, empirically grounded social science. There are a
lot of clusters of reasons [for why this is, having to do with] how
people are trained, the sense of community that they have while
they’re being trained. I think that grounding in [the] empirical is
something strong that makes historians sort of have more of an80 / On Disciplinary Cultures