Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
Pragmatism has affected American historical writing since the early twentieth century. Such contemporaries and students of Peirce, James, and Dewey as drew on pragmatism when they fashioned what was called the ''new history.'' They wanted to topple inherited assumptions about the past and replace positivist historical methods with the pragmatists' model of a community of inquiry. Such widely read mid-twentiethcentury historians as Merle Curti, Henry Steele Commager, and Richard Hofstadter embraced the perspectivalism, fallibilism, and instrumentalism of the pragmatists, thereby helping to sustain the tradition during its nadir in American philosophy departments. Many historians have been drawn to the study of pragmatism during its recent renaissance; others have advanced pragmatist-inspired philosophies of history. Through such prominent contemporary historians as Thomas Haskell, David Hollinger, and Joyce Appleby, the ideas of Pierce, James, and Dewey continue to influence the historical profession.Pragmatism has affected the practice and attracted the attention of prominent American historians for more than a century. Some historians have expressed an explicit debt to the ideas of pragmatist philosophers, whom they have credited with opening their eyes to perspectivalism and instrumentalism. Others have emphasized the pragmatists primarily because of their significance in twentieth-century American thought and culture. Finally, still others have been unself-conscious or unwitting pragmatists, embodying in their scholarship the idea that all knowledge is provisional and the idea that all propositions should be tested by a community of inquiry, the central concepts of pragmatism that were given their most sophisticated elaboration by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Rather than attempting to survey the overall influence of pragmatism on the historical profession, a topic much too ambitious for an essay, I shall examine here the writings of a small number of twentieth-century historians who owed a clear debt to
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.