Isolationism of a Kind: Two Generations of World Court Historiography in the United States

Abstract

With these apocryphal words from the proverbial doughboy, Charles Homer Haskins lightened his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1922. Haskins's theme was the historical and historiographical relevance of Europe to Americans, two subjects on which he could speak authoritatively. Dean of the Harvard Graduate School, an outstanding scholar of medievalism and the Mediterranean, Haskins was best known to his contemporaries as a member of Woodrow Wilson's research team at the Paris Peace Conference, the so-called Inquiry. In the course of his address Haskins surveyed the current state of American writing on European history and pronounced it moderately satisfying; but his underlying anxiety could not be disguised. Since he believed that all the “great European wars” had been “in every instance…American wars” and therefore “world wars,” Haskins feared the consequences of any American political and academic neglect of Europe. In Haskins's ambiguous formulation: “European history [was] of profound importance to Americans.”