in traditionally less favored geographical areas. Were the discipline
smaller, it might be characterized by more conflict. In several of the
competitions I studied, historians were perceived as receiving the
lion’s share of awards, in part because they apply in such large num-
bers and are always represented on panels. The disciplinary fault
lines might be deeper were I comparing tensions within subfields,
such as American history or Chinese history.
The field’s degree of consensus has fluctuated over the twentieth
century. Along with rising disciplinary autonomy and professional-
ism, such consensus increased as the postwar college boom spurred
a fivefold increase in the number of history professors (between
1940 and 1970).^38 During the 1960s, the discipline became polarized
politically, with each side claiming objectivity. Influenced by cul-
tural anthropology and hermeneutics, many historians grew increas-
ingly critical of the idea of objectivity, but the discipline as a whole
was able to find another basis of consensus in the practice of his-
torical scholarship. Although anti-theoretical proclivities remained,
epistemological issues came to be seen as “too hot to handle.”^39 As
a historian of China explains, “With other historians on the panel,
asyouknow,wedotendtoagree,butnottoomuch...History
is very subjective.” As in English, divisions occur largely around
the use of theory. This same Chinese historian describes tensions
within the discipline that reflect the difficulty of accommodating
some of the more recent theory-driven trends with the longstanding
American tradition of thinking of “history as science,” grounded in
objectivity.^40
I would see the polarity as being less between evidence and story-
telling than between being evidence driven and being theory
driven—that is, where you’re engaged in an enterprise which is
driven by certain kinds of cultural theory that is outside history
and you turn to history with those questions. [For one group] the82 / On Disciplinary Cultures