ABSTRACT
The progressive historians related events and earlier historical interpretations to various specific environmental factors, these historians were not fatalistic about the possibility for change in their own times. A framework of Pragmatic and Progressive assumptions and attitudes inspired the first great flowering of professional American scholarship in history. Few intellectuals at the turn of the century could escape the evolutionary ideologies and the intense awareness of social process which dominated the age. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, and Comte found many eager students and influenced the education of the young historians in a variety of ways. The notion that the historian served as the willing or unwilling spokesman of his time was an idea common to all three scholars throughout their lives. A strong impulse toward “presentism” was often the natural companion of relativism. None of the Progressive historians conceded much to history as the plaything of the idle curiosity, a field studied for its own sake and nothing more.
