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Davis Center for Historical Studies: 50Th Anniversary COLORS PMS 194 (red) Black Gray = 60% of Black FONTS Davis Center = Baskerville Regular for = Princeton Monticello Regular Italic Historical Studies = Princeton Monticello Regular FONTS “Let’s Have at It”: “Let’s Have Davis Center = Baskerville Regular for = Princeton Monticello Regular Italic The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Fifty for Historical Center Davis The Shelby Cullom Historical Studies = Princeton Monticello Regular 50th = Baskerville Regular ANNIVERSARY = Baskerville Regular CAPS “Let’s Have at It”: The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Fifty Copyright©2019 by The Trustees of Princeton University by Sean H. Vanatta and Randall Todd Pippenger 50th Anniversary 1 “Let’s Have at It”: The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Fifty by Sean H. Vanatta and Randall Todd Pippenger 2 Davis Center’s To the memory of Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 and Lawrence Stone, and in honor of Natalie Zemon Davis 50th Anniversary i Acknowledgments This “small” pamphlet has been more than one year in the making. It was made possible by the vision and commitment of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies’ eighth director, Professor Angela N. H. Creager, and was conceived as part of a broader effort to commemorate the history of the Davis Center on its fiftieth anni- versary. The larger project, nearing its final completion, has been ded- icated to documenting and preserving the first fifty years of the Davis Center’s history. Under its auspices, the authors have undertaken an extensive oral history and collections project, interviewing former di- rectors, executive secretaries, managers, department chairs, and long- term participants in the Davis Center’s seminar; compiling surveys of past fellows; and gathering annual reports, programs, memoranda, private correspondence, and newspaper, magazine, and journal arti- cles. Many people have helped to bring this pamphlet into existence. We would like to thank every person who participated in the oral history project, including David Bell, Angela Creager, Robert Darn- ton, Natalie Zemon Davis, William Deringer, John Elliott, Jennifer Houle Goldman, Anthony Grafton, William Chester Jordan, Richard Kagan, Stanley Katz, Kevin Kruse, Philip Nord, Gyan Prakash, the late Theodore Rabb, Daniel Rodgers, John Talbott, Robert Tignor, Keith Wailoo, and Sean Wilentz. The former fellows who completed our survey questionnaire, sent pictures, and provided sketches of their experiences of the Davis Center were incredibly helpful in the pro- duction of this essay, as were the staffs of the Department of Special Collections and Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University. A debt of special gratitude is owed for the able, indeed magical, as- sistance of the Davis Center’s veteran manager, Jennifer Houle Gold- man, as well as the support of the Department of History’s wonderful administrative staff, including Judith Hanson, Jennifer Loessy, Pame- la Long, Deborah Macy, Judith Miller, Kristy Novak, Max Siles, and Carla Zimowsk. It is doubtful the pamphlet would have been finished without their support and encouragement. The current authors cer- ii Davis Center’s tainly would not have penned it. David Bell, Nancy Weiss Malkiel, and Daniel Rodgers read an earlier draft, and their suggestions and comments dramatically improved the final product. Of course, any errors remain most assuredly our own. Finally, both authors would like to thank especially Angela Crea- ger for her support, generosity, encouragement, and occasional nudg- ing over the past fifteen months. As with so many of the fellows in the past fifty years, our experience working under the auspices of the Davis Center has been productive, stimulating, rewarding, and conge- nial because of its leadership. In its first half century of existence, almost four hundred scholars have been formally connected to the Davis Center for Historical Stud- ies as fellows, executive secretaries, and directors. Thousands more, including both of us, have received financial support from the Center for academic research. It is impossible to do justice to the rich history of such an institution in a mere fifty pages, but we tried. Thank you for reading. Sean H. Vanatta and Randall Todd Pippenger Princeton, New Jersey September 22, 2019 50th Anniversary 1 The “Hot History Department” A good portion of the Princeton History department usually turns up on Friday mornings in the seminar room deep in the bowels of the Firestone Library. But one Friday last October, the place was jammed and the air was alive with anticipation. Jean-Christophe Agnew, a Yale professor, had ventured into the weekly Shelby Cullom Davis Seminar, a lion’s den in which many a historian has been torn apart.1 In its first twenty years, the weekly seminar of the Shelby Cul- lom Davis Center for Historical Studies developed a reputation for conducting tenacious, occasionally vicious, interrogations of precircu- lated papers organized under biennial themes ranging from the his- tory of professions and university education to popular religion and culture. It was a reputation that gained the notice of the New York Times. Lawrence Stone, the Dodge Professor of History and first di- rector of the Davis Center, between 1969 and 1990, was known for his rough-and-tumble approach to academic and intellectual debate. This style often left participants with a choice only of “the method by which they [could] commit intellectual suicide.”2 Stone once compared the director of a social history project presenting at the seminar to the last dinosaur “devouring all of the remaining provender that might oth- erwise sustain dozens of smaller but better conceived studies.”3 And though he was supposed to have “mellowed” in his later years, Stone opened a seminar in the final year of his directorship by claiming that a paper presented by an eminent French historian “made me gag.”4 Unfortunately, the French historian had to ask for clarification: “C’est quoi, ‘gag’?”5 Stone was not alone in strident critiques and stinging asides. De- scribing the atmosphere of the seminar in 1977, Bertram Wyatt-Brown claimed that “Lawrence Stone was noted for sometimes encouraging a gladiatorial atmosphere. It was as if the presenter were suddenly 1 Mark Silk, “The Hot History Department,” New York Times, April 19, 1987. 2 John M. Murrin, “The Eminence Rouge?,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 28–29. 3 Murrin, 29. 4 Susan Amussen, Fellows Survey by Randall Todd Pippenger, 2018, 8. 5 Philip Nord, Interview by Sean Vanatta, July 27, 2018, transcript, 8–9; and David Bell, Interview by Sean Vanatta, October 29, 2018, transcript, 10–11. 2 Davis Center’s thrust into an arena to face both bloodthirsty spectators and snarling beasts.”6 French historian Roger Chartier described the early seminars as both friendly and frightening—friendly because of the intellectual community the Center created for its participants, frightening because of the “harsh comments generally made by Lawrence Stone” as well as the “very critical attitude of some (younger) participants in the seminar.” For Chartier, the posture of the aggressive junior faculty seemed to be “necessary for affirming expertise and authority in the competitions that characterize the American academy.”7 Stone likely would have approved of Chartier’s characterization. In an interview given to the Princeton Weekly Bulletin in 1981, Stone claimed: The Davis seminars have a reputation of being ferocious. Some paper-givers whose presentations have not been up to par have been roughed up (in a manner of speaking, of course) pretty badly, but on the whole we try to avoid getting personal. The better-known historian can hold his own, but if young people are before us, we’re usually pretty gentle. These papers will gener- ally form the basis for a future book, so we try to be helpful and make suggestions which tighten the presentation.8 The stories of academic combat from the early seminars are leg- endary, made believable only by their volume and the frequency with which they are repeated by participants and eyewitnesses. However, the final sentence of Stone’s statement points to the underlying pur- poses of the Davis Center and the research seminar it has sponsored for the last fifty years. The goals of the Davis seminar, then as now, were not to savage presenters and their papers, nor to function as one of the history profession’s many gatekeepers. Instead, the Davis Cen- ter was meant to keep the department on the “frontier” or the “cutting edge” of historical research—to look toward the future of scholarship and to hasten its coming.9 As Stone later stated in the interview with 6 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition,” Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), xiii. Wyatt-Brown was a visiting fellow at the Davis Center from 1977 to 1978 under the theme History of the Family. 7 Roger Chartier, Fellows Survey, 2–3. 8 Stone as quoted in Cynthia Furlong Reynolds, “Davis Seminars Probe Historical Studies,” Princeton Weekly Bulletin, December 7, 1981, 3. 9 Lawrence Stone, “Annual Report of the Davis Center, 1969–1970,” Annual Reports to the Pres- 50th Anniversary 3 the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, “We have always tried to focus on what appeared to be a theme on the verge of take-off in academic circles.”10 The foundational goal of the research seminar was to produce, in the words of John Murrin, “intense intellectual engagement with a prob- lem that truly matters.”11 On December 8, 1968, the president of Princeton University, Robert F. Goheen, announced the establishment of a new center for historical research at Princeton University: the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.
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