Characteristic of the Warren Center's general approach, the volume concluded with seven brief "essay reviews" of books that, according to co-editors Bailyn and Fleming, "either in themselves change the perspective on significant issues in American history or that provide the occasion for a general re-assessment of such issues."
Volume II, which will appear this fall, concentrates on a single theme--"The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960."
The John Harvard Library was established by the Belknap Press of the University Press in 1955 to make important but inaccessible documents of American cultural history generally available. The collection includes such works as Frederick Hawkins Piercy's Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley and Isaac Ray's A Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity.
It has been 14 years since The Harvard Guide to American History, first assembled in 1896, was revised by Handlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Samuel Eliot Morison, Frederick Merk, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Paul H. Buck. In what was the kitchen of the house the Warren Center now lives in, Richard K. Showman, formerly in charge of educational exhibits at Sturbridge Village, is working full-time to bring the bibliography up to date, under the general supervision of Frank Freidel.
The revised guide will add 500 listings selected from over 100,000 books and articles on American history printed since 1954 to the 15,000 citations (some of which will be dropped) of the existing volume. The University Press is scheduled to publish the revision in early 1970, unless the great demand for the guide results in a decision to employ a computer to speed up the work.
The Warren Center plans a similar revision every five years, to prevent a repetition of this massive task. Tentative plans also call for a paperback supplement every year.
Upstairs in the quieter wing of the Center--away from the noise and typewriters of the administration and publications staff--are studies for the 11 post-doctoral fellows and four foreign scholars. It is here that the serious scholarship--the Warren Center's really unique contribution to the field--is carried on.
A typical post-doctoral fellow is a teaching historian who has published one book and needs time and facilities to work on a second. According to its second annual report, the Center "recognizes that the critical stage in scholarly training now comes after the award of the doctoral degree when the recipient prepares his work for publication and starts a new proj- ect." This need intensifies, the report continues, with the increasing condensation of graduate studies, which themselves lead directly to full-time teaching.
Last year, the post-doctoral studies included such topics as the background of the 1964 civil rights act, post-Civil War Indian policy, a demographic study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Andover, early development in the modernist impulse in American Protestantism, the career of Charles Merriam, and Anglo-American politics in colonial New York.
These fellowships, Fleming says, "mean that a person in American history has another opportunity to do research; and there aren't really many opportunities like it."
The Center's program for awarding fellowships to foreign scholars "might, after a period of years, prove to be the most important thing we've done," notes Fleming. By supporting the studies of "young scholars" who will return to teach in their own countries, the Warren Center hopes to raise the low level of international interest in American history. An Indian and a Swede received appointments for last year's trial run of the program; this term four foreign scholars (from Japan, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland) are at the Center.
The Warren Center's future development will probably involve little more than a continuation of current projects and a moderate expansion of the fellowship program. Limited office space and funds restrict the number of fellows to 15. In new headquarters --one possibility is moving into Littauer once the Kenedy Library is completed--and with probable subsidiary grants, the Warren Center could conceivably accept most of the qualified (meaning, very highly qualified) post-doctoral American historians who apply for the fellowships. Applications for the first three years of the program have averaged around 50, and the number may dwindle after a few years. Moreover, a similar center to be opened by Johns Hopkins University may draw off part of this limited supply.
The overall concept of the Charles Warren Center is a valuable and farsighted step in advancing the study of American history. As Fleming notes, "There's nothing really like this anywhere else.