The common adventure of mankind: Academic internationalism and Western historical practice from Versailles to Potsdam

This thesis examines academic internationalism in Western historical practice through a study of transnational research projects and exchange programs conducted from the Armistice of 1918 to the era of the Cold War. Modern cosmopolitan learning in professional historiography appeared to lay in ruins at the termination of the Great War. But the first interwar decade and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War also witnessed a remarkable window of international collaboration and experimentation among scholars of the United States and Continental Europe. Despite an overarching atmosphere of cultural trauma, leading historians from America and Western Europe strove to reconstruct professional scholarship around a common international commitment to reason and open exchange. National traditions of research and contemporary politics also compelled an apparent embrace of progressive reform. A comparative study of specific projects of academic internationalism can delineate how these trends interacted within the wider attempt to construct and to protect visions of postwar “normalcy.” These examinations suggest why interwar designs were vulnerable to the manipulation of nationalist historians and demonstrates how apparently complementary collaboration often foundered on inconsistencies internal to the very process of liberal reform.;These projects reveal the centrality of American power in international academic research, which mirrored interwar Atlantic patterns of interwar financial, economic and political relations. Guided by a faith in ecumenical progressivism, American philanthropic foundations invested significantly in collaborative efforts for “non-political” forms of historical research. European scholars greeted American overtures in order to pursue their own programs of national experimentation or self interest. After 1945, historians faced the further challenge of denazification and the international legitimization of German historiography. The case studies illustrate how liberal considerations of intellectual renewal intermeshed with countervailing political realities to shape methodological experimentation in fields of cultural, social, and economic history. The dissertation concludes that national models of disciplinary reform were bound inextricably to international debates about which methodologies could best secure both professional achievement while uniting a badly divided profession in the poisoned political culture of Europe. It thus offers a call for a new international focus to the history of modern historiography.