John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America

John Franklin Jameson (1859-1937) was instrumental in the development of history as an academic discipline in the United States. After the Johns Hopkins University awarded him its first doctorate in history, he became a founder of the American Historical Review and was a key figure in the creation of the National Archives, the National Historical Publications Commission, and the Dictionary of American Biography.

The first volume of Jameson's papers (Georgia, 1993) provided a representative view of his scholarly concerns and his public positions as an advocate for history through a selection of his lectures, speeches, essays, and articles. The present volume includes diary entries, published here in full for the first time, which cover virtually all of Jameson's collegiate and graduate education and his early teaching career. Also included are letters and official reports that further trace Jameson's emergence as a historian and the strategy he mapped out for promoting historical scholarship.

These documents illuminate Jameson's undergraduate career at Amherst, his graduate education and teaching at Johns Hopkins, his tenure as a professor at Brown, and his direction of the history department at the University of Chicago, focusing here mainly on his efforts to establish an institutional home for history at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The third, and final, volume will also include letters and official reports, and will begin with Jameson's appointment in 1905 as director of the Department of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.