Herbert H. Rowen and the Tradition of Early Modern History in the U.S.

Abstract

In the story of American scholarship over the past 150 years, since the age of Ranke and the birth of modern historical methods, the role of orphan was played for many decades by the history of seventeenth-century Europe. Looking back, it seems extraordinary that this should have been so. After all, Ranke himself had made this period — the “long” seventeenth century, now called the early modern period, from the aftermath of the Reformation to the Enlightenment — his special province. And the two greatest historians of Europe at work in America in the nineteenth century, William H. Prescott and John L. Motley, had achieved their fame by describing the exemplary heroism of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans.

An earlier version of this essay was delivered on the occasion of Herbert Rowen’s retirement from Rutgers University, May 1987.