| This dissertation explores history as a field of activity and inquiry in the early nineteenth century. Well before it acquired professional status, or was included in the university, history was being disciplined to tell particular stories and serve certain ends. Early in the century writers of non-fictional historical narratives were less involved in disciplining and demarcating the territory of history than were historical novelists and gentleman-historians, for whom historical activity was more or less a hobby. Popular fiction and the periodical press were the sites from which the authority of the historian, and the subjects, methods, and materials appropriate to "his" study were debated, initially with the result of elastic and often expansive, or inclusive, definitions of the subjects of and agents in history.;The development and demise of the Public Records Commission in Britain (1800-1836), and the public addresses of newly formed historical societies in America were the occasions for public discussions about the province of history and its rightful rulers and keepers. Furthermore, historical novelists figure the historical discipline in terms that re-value the raw materials of history: for instance, Walter Scott's vision of the discipline as monastic, in The Antiquary, authorizes a history--and a vision of the novel--that is masculine and textual, while Lydia Maria Child's approach in her novel Hobomok is influenced by the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, and so values oral testimony and imagines women as agents in history. Both historical novels allow, at least temporarily, class, gender, and race into the pool of characteristics that influence the past and the narratives constructed about it.;Writing multi-volumed national history around mid-century, Thomas Babington Macaulay and George Bancroft disciplined history as much by their cultural cache as political figures, as by their manipulation of subjects and sources. Each capitalized on the accumulation of historical materials that coincided with the earlier debates, and the financial success of the historical novel, but defined himself according to more exclusive notions of the historian and his proper subject of study, and thus brought the discipline of history a step closer to professionalization. |
