Clio's Dream; or, Has the Muse Departed from the Temple? Implications for Library History

The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century. By Thomas Bender, Philip M. Katz, Colin Palmer, and the Committee on Graduate Education (AHA). Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 200 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-252-02898-8.

The desire to reflect upon the past may be as old as humanity itself—how are we to know? After all, the recent epistemologically driven forays into the raison d'être of history and historical practice speak to a certain anxiety among historians surveying their intellectual and perhaps at times ontological conditions. Whether grounded in historiographic analysis or within a broader concern over the profession and practice of the humanities or social sciences as a whole, historians have much to be proud of and as much to be concerned about. Reflection upon the historical enterprise is not new, nor has it been wanting; to the contrary, it has been bound up in the seasoned musings of historians who, having reached the ends of their careers, deem it worthy to set their thoughts on that which has taken their lives to task.¹ These thoughts and musings often offer more of the author, as either academic or in some fashion a professional historian, than anything truly historiographically concrete. There are many reasons for this.

The distance and acuity required to examine one's professional vocation is a rare attribute. It demands the ability to weigh the contours and substance of one's intellectual and sociological existence as practitioner and professor of a discipline.² Socratic admonition aside, it demands the most vigilant and concerted self-examination, at times ruthlessly honest and disquieting. Perhaps, in a strange way, philosophy of history or its more historically grounded brethren, historiography, is so terribly difficult to countenance. Those who specialize in and practice historiography, especially its more pure variety (i.e., the history of history, epistemological and philosophical examination, over event-oriented historiography, e.g., the Enlightenment as historical problem), constitute a rare scholarly species. In the professional environment in which historical practice is situated, historiography and philosophy of history are indeed rarefied pursuits. Certainly, courses at the undergraduate and graduate level exist, but as necessary components of scholarly acculturation, not as means and ends unto themselves. As a specialty, historiography and the philosophy of history are tolerated intellectual baggage, necessary for becoming a historian but not to be misconstrued as doing history.

With this in mind, it is never easy to examine one's own profession from within, for as practitioner such existential introspection demands an ability to step aside and peer into the mirror. Doing so opens one to the exigencies and vulnerabilities of soul-searching if not professional pulse reading. Any realignment or radical change in course can be fairly difficult and at times exceedingly open to criticism. Admittedly, such self-examination has its rewards and its possible burdens. Periodically, professions embark upon such a course in keeping with their prerogatives as stewards of their special vocation and knowledge.³ As the academy has evolved, attempts to ascertain where the disciplines are and where they are heading have become critically imperative for sustained scholarly well-being and intellectual vitality. During the last thirty to forty years scholarly disciplines have undergone pervasive influences and transformation, so much so that most of the humanities and social sciences may be professionally unrecognizable to older practitioners.⁴ New fields of interest, specialties, and even subdisciplines have been born.⁵ Critically generated theoretical analysis informs more traditionally accepted domains of knowledge and practice. Consequently, an attempt to get our bearings is paramount to understanding just where the center is within a discipline in both theory and practice.

As the American historical profession has undergone the rigors of the transformation of American higher education, so too has it accommodated those changes implicit within the academy. Continued...