ABSTRACT
Prior to World War I conservative evolutionists and progressives shared in approximately equal measure the work of a young, eagerly developing profession. In the 1920's and 1930's the old conservative school, although strongly entrenched in many institutions, suffered a steady and ultimately disastrous loss of intellectual vitality. Constitutional history, with its emphasis on the permanent rather than the transitory aspects of government and politics, has been falling into neglect", one elder statesman mourned in 1934. In American colonial history the constitutional or institutional approach retained for some years an appearance of continuing vigor because of the prestige of the Imperial school. Marcus L. Hansen's work, almost all of it unpublished and incomplete at his untimely death in 1938, went far beyond the usual limits of progressive history. While these researchers were expanding the base of American history, other scholars were constructing a new synthesis of the whole story.
