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2 Early Historians The awarding of PhDs in history in the United States began in 1882 when Johns Hopkins andYale conferred the first two doctorates in that field.Graduate study in history expanded rapidly in the following years: by 1901–2 eighteen institutions offered the PhD, and an average of nineteen history doctorates was being awarded each year, though this figure represented only 6.5 percent of all doctorates .1 The recipient of the first Johns Hopkins doctorate was John Franklin Jameson, who became a pivotal figure in the development of historical studies in the United States, not so much because of his own scholarship but because of his work as the head of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Historical Research (1905–28) and his long connection with the American Historical Association and the American Historical Review, of which he was managing editor for most of the period 1895–1928. His last position was as head of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.2 In the late nineteenth century, undergraduate and graduate training in history was confined almost entirely to the study of the United States and Europe. As a result, the first courses in Latin American history were perforce offered by instructors who had no formal training in the field. The first person known to have taught a course related to Latin American history was Daniel De Leon, who is remembered chiefly as a leading socialist thinker and political activist. A native of Curaçao, De Leon received a law degree from Columbia University in 1878. Five years later he won the first prize lectureship to be awarded by Columbia ’s new School of Political Science. Required to offer a series of lectures, De Leon chose South American diplomacy as his subject. He initially covered the “relations of Spain and Portugal to America during the colonial period” as well as the relations of the independent republics to imperial Brazil; in 1885 he added a unit on European intervention in Latin America in the mid-nineteenth century. The lectureship was renewed for a second three-year term in 1886, but 34 Chapter 2. in 1889 his connection with Columbia and the academic world was severed as he became more deeply involved in radical politics. His only publication during his lectureship was a campaign pamphlet in 1884 critical of James G.Blaine’s Latin American policy.3 More lasting was the commitment of Bernard Moses, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who in 1895 initiated the study of Spanish American history in the United States with a one-semester course ranging from the colonial period to the postindependence development of the new republics . The son of a Connecticut farmer, Moses graduated from the University of Michigan in 1870; he spent the next five years in Europe, mainly in Germany , and was awarded a doctorate by the University of Heidelberg. Beginning his long career at Berkeley in 1876, Moses was for a time not only the sole history professor at the university but also, in 1880, the first to offer a course there under the rubric of political science. During this period his principal publications were in the field of Swedish history and politics. By the late 1880s he had decided to shift his emphasis to Latin American history,“moved perhaps by an instinctive sense that California, a former Spanish territory, did not present an advantageous point for viewing Swedish affairs.” He taught himself Spanish, visited Mexico, and spent part of the academic year 1891–92 in Spain.4 Moses began to publish articles on Mexican history in the 1880s. In 1898 he urged teachers and scholars to study what he called the “neglected half of American history.”5 Acknowledging that it might be inopportune to make such a plea on the eve of war with Spain, he argued that studying the Spanish role in America would give a more accurate view of the development of the Western Hemisphere and would lessen the provincialism of Americans. The same year saw the appearance of Moses’s first book on a Latin American topic, The Establishment of Spanish Rule in America, which has been described as the “first scholarly history of colonial Hispanic America by a professor of the subject, with a student following, to be published in the United States.” Moses intended the book to be an introduction for students and general readers.In it he repeated his belief that the history of colonial Spanish America was...

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