History

The Common Adventure of Mankind by John Layton Harvey

The Common Adventure of Mankind: Academic Historians and an Atlantic Identity in the Twentieth Century

John Layton Harvey

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Perhaps no aspect of academic history in Europe and the United States is so honored as its cosmopolitan heritage. Amidst the ruins of European culture after 1918, progressive-minded historians from America and the Continent such as James Shotwell, Henri Pirenne, Lucien Febvre and Walter Goetz sought to fashion a denationalized "Republic of Letters" through new international journals, collaborative encyclopedias and professional exchange organizations. These efforts were closely tied up with such seminal experiments as the Annales movement and the famous Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.

In The Common Adventure of Mankind, historian John Layton Harvey rebuts the idea that this internationalization naturally led to greater social and cultural tolerance. Instead, Harvey shows how these international projects were quickly permeated by the ethnically chauvinist and ideologically conservative attitudes of their founders. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, well-known senior historians from Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford and other top-line schools tightened their ties to the European ideological right and openly cooperated with Nazi scholars. The Common Adventure of Mankind unmasks this betrayal of humane values, and explores its shattering ramifications for the subsequent history of world scholarship.

Fall 2010