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I suppose I am not alone in claiming to have had a particularly fortunate experience in my graduate training. But I did. My teachers at the University of Iowa included W.O. Aydelotte who was doing some of the most interesting historical work at the University of Iowa in formal analysis and quantitative studies. But what was at least as important was that Aydelotte was as much interested in Proust (in French) as he was in technical procedures and techniques. Rosalie L. Colie was my other graduate teacher. Her provocative studies of Renaissance literature and the history of science had a profound effect on my mental and emotional development. Aydelottte’s and Colie’s teaching meant that there was never two cultures in my intellectual experience. They also cut me loose in tutorials and independent studies so that I could pursue my own interests. As a consequence I could search for intellectual patterns in political and cultural studies which a more rigid and conventional program of study might have prevented or made more difficult. I wouldn’t wish to describe this education as interdisciplinary. Rather, what I learned was that disciplines, particularly history, but all disciplines I suppose, are not marked by sharp frontiers and that I should look for interesting ideas wherever they might be found; that I should read Kuhn as well as Namier and Gombrich as well as Kristeller. And this has led me to the ideas which have emerged from and have guided my teaching and research.

After graduate school I returned to Central College, where I had been an undergraduate, to teach until 1971. Then, I moved to the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey where I have been since. In the intervening years I have taught courses in European and British history and in historical methods and I have published a series of articles and three books: on government growth in Britain (1971), on the British House of Commons (1988), and on the Cambridge Apostles (1998).

If I were to summarize the thoughts and ideas which have emerged from this job of work it would be the following.

Government growth is less a consequence of detailed or systematic programs. Rather expanded government action occurs as a result of the ways politicians struggle, compete, and compromise, to deal with concrete problems and as they build political support, in the cabinet and in parliament, for them. Political traditions contain within themselves opportunities for innovation; innovations have their own traditions.

The quantitative study of parliamentary voting in the House of Commons in 1886 showed how necessary it was to combine archival research and the study of literary materials with the more formal procedures of voting analysis. It also showed how all classificatory systems contain the seeds of their own destruction, that social classifications always breakdown, and some of the most revealing features of social analysis reside in the cases which fit outside the patterns one expects to find. The central idea to emerge from this research, however, is the idea of multidimensionality: that experience cannot be described on a single dimension, that political and social experience requires two (or more) dimensions to represent, describe, and explain it.

My study of the Cambridge Apostles is an excursion into the intersection of mental and public life. It takes one group of individuals, many of whom became prominent in their maturity, and after examining their intellectual and mental educations, traces their lives in the world of the nineteenth and twentieth professions. Consequently, it took up the concepts of Bildung and vocation, character and duty, power and authority, and examines the role of intimacy, friendship, and learning in the liberal state.

These research projects converge in various ways and I wish to pursue their implications in the following ways. What interests me is not political or intellectual or social history. I am interested in the histories of processes, the histories of sattelzeiten, of phase transitions, those moments where thought and action intersect. This has to do with the relations between thought and power. I am particularly interested in informal associations such as the club-like life of the House of Commons and the knowledge communities which create, confirm, and disseminate tacit knowledge. I am particularly interested in explaining the role of loyalty and trust, in identify formation, in the relation between social change and mental change and in the role of religion in the modern world.

These interests lead me to the histories of concepts, those fragments or figments of consciousness which capture reality in time and space. Since concepts are not structured into nature or experience, they have to be regarded as tools to establish our relationship to what we know and what we do not know. It is a kind of Begriffsgeschichte, not so much the changing meanings of concepts but rather the study of those contingencies out of which concepts emerge. Those contingencies are where thought and action, mentality and materiality, the abstract and the concrete meet.

These concepts are about processes. Now, processes cannot be observed; they can only be inferred. Concepts’ edges are cognitively soft; they are indeterminate. They are internally riven; they contain internal contradictions and differences. Concepts are not closed, with sharp borders. Concepts lie in landscapes of contingency, possibility and anxiety. They offer opportunities for improvisation. They take advantage of ambiguity and open the metaphorical spaces they contain. Consequently, this takes me to the study of the social, mental, and emotional conflicts of people in their material environments. Out of these processes, concepts (and consciousness) emerge. Concepts, therefore, are not passive; they serve human transformational and transactional functions.

These thoughts, which I would like to think are not some sort of flight from the real, the material, and the concrete, lead me to a particular view of the historical discipline. The discipline of history is not merely a series of facts and information or even a series of conclusions. It is about agency and contingency, about the way human beings do things and the ways in which those things are done. It is more than representation. It is more than the evidence or conclusions we have about the world outside the self. Truth and certainty are more than the cogency of some statements and the accuracy of some evidence. Truth and certainty lie at the intersections of concepts about the world and the ways it works. They lie at the intersections of evidence about the world and one’s struggles to comprehend the limits of what understands about those concepts and evidence.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the American Historical Association, a member of the Commission Internationale pour l’Histoire des Assemblées d’États, and I was a founding member of the Social Science History Association and for a time I was its Convenor of the Network on Legislative and Electoral History. I am the Treasurer and a director of the American Friends of the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). I am the President of the Middle Atlantic Conference on British Studies and I am the Vice-President (and incoming President) of the North American Conference on British Studies.

My College has granted various awards to me: the Faculty Merit Award (1988), the Stockton College Board of Trustees Excellence and Distinguished Service Award (1991 and 2002), numerous research and professional development grants, the Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (1990 and 1996). The National Endowment for the Humanities granted me a a Consultancy Grant for the General Arts and Humanities Curriculum of Stockton College (1979-1980). The New Jersey Department of Higher Education provided me a Grant for Public History (1984-1985). I received a Newberry Library Grant-in-Aid (1969), a Huntington Library Fellowship (1974), travel grants from the American Philosophical Society (1973, 1982, 1991, 1998), and I have been a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College in the University of Cambridge (1982, 1990, 1997).

1. PUBLICATION LIST

Books:

The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)

The Politics of Government Growth: Early Victorian Attitudes Toward State Intervention, 1833-1848 (Newton Abbot, Devon and Hampden, Connecticut: David and Charles, Ltd., 1971)

Articles:

“Intimacy, Imagination, and the Inner Dialectics of Knowledge Communities: The Synthetic Society, 1896-1908,” in Martin Daunton, (ed.), The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, forthcoming)

“Religion in the University: Authority, Faith, and Learning” [Essay Review], Minerva (forthcoming)

“Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians: The Rise and Fall of the Intellectual Aristocracy,” in Miles Taylor and Michael Woolf, (eds.), The Victorians After 1901: Histories, Representations, Revisions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming)

“Sir Henry Babington Smith, 1863-1923” and “Walter Leaf, 1852-1927,” in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, (eds.), The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

“Lytton Strachey, 1880-1932,” in John Powell and Derek Blakeley, (eds.), Biographical Directory of Literary Influences: The Twentieth Century (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, forthcoming)

“Authority, Honor, and the Strachey Family, 1817-1974,” Historical Research, 76, no. 194 (November 2003), pp. 512-534.

“Making Words Flesh: Changing Roles of University Learning and the Professions in Nineteenth Century England,” Minerva, 40, 3 (2002), pp. 217-234.

“University History and the History of Universities in the Nineteenth Century,” [Essay Review], Journal of British Studies, 39, 2 (April 2000), pp. 247-262.

“The Cambridge Apostles” and “Espionage” in Fred Leventhal, (ed.), Twentieth-Century Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland Press, 1995), pp. 21-22, 269-270.

“The Meaning of Voting Dimensions in the Late Victorian Liberal Party,” in Joni Lovenduski and Jeffrey Stanyer, (eds.), Contemporary Political Studies, 1995, Volume 1 (Exeter: Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, 1995), pp. 34-41.

“The Liberals and the National Question: Irish Home Rule, Nationalism and their Relationship to Nineteenth-Century Liberalism,” in John Phillips, (ed.), Computing Parliamentary History, George III to Victoria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 119-142.

“Radicals and Moderate in the Liberal Party in 1886: The Processes of Political Assimilation in the House of Commons,” Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, 6, 2 (December 1986), pp. 181-201.

“The Class Struggle and the House of Commons: The Parliamentary Response to the London Riots in 1886,” Histoire sociale—Social History, 18, no. 35 (Mai-May 1985), pp. 45-57.

“Irish Home Rule and the Social Basis of the Great Separation in the Liberal Party in 1886,” Historical Journal, 28, 1 (1985), pp. 125-142.

“Irish Home Rule and the Great Separation in the Liberal Party: the Dimensions of Parliamentary Liberalism,” Victorian Studies, 26, 2 (Winter 1983), pp. 161-180.

“Ireland, the Great Depression and the Railway Rates: Political Issues and Backbench Opinion in the House of Commons in 1886,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 122, 4 (August 1978), pp. 204-213.

“Social Recruitment and Social Attitudes: the Buckinghamshire Magistracy, [1886]-1888,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 40, 3 (May 1977), pp. 247-268.

I have published book reviews in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, Albion, the Newsletter of the British Politics Group of the American Political Science Association, Classical World, Nineteenth-Century Prose, the History of Education Quarterly, Parliamentary History, the Historian, Victorian Studies, and Cambridge.

I have presented papers at meetings of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Conference on the Organization of Knowledge at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (University of Cambridge), the Western Conference on British Studies, the Conference on Teaching and Learning in Nineteenth-Century Cambridge (Trinity College, Cambridge), the History of Parliament Seminar (University of London), Modern British History Seminar (University of London), Nuffield College, Oxford, the Middle Atlantic Conference on British Studies, the Political Studies Association Meeting (York, UK), Seminar on Modern British Politics (University of Cambridge), the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, the Southern Conference on British Studies, and the Social Science History Association.

CURRENT RESEARCH

“The Royal Society, the British Academy and the Invention of ‘Two Cultures’”

Peers, Power, and Piety: The British Roman Catholic Aristocracy, 1815-1914

Making Words Flesh: Authority, Society, and Deliberative Liberalism in Modern Britain, 1815-1914