ABSTRACT
In 1907 at a session of the American Historical Association devoted to American constitutional history, Professor William MacDonald read his colleagues a warning. For progressive historians, then, the dynamics of change constituted the great issue of historical inquiry. Their rebellion against the dominant kind of institutional history did not arise from indifference to politics or constitutions; much of their research concerned political organizations, particularly political parties. As progressives, the New Historians had a vivid sense that a great turning point had arrived in American experience In turning outward from institutional to environmental history, progressive scholars were in another respect turning inward. They were becoming in a certain sense more nationalistic than their conservative colleagues. The latter, seeking the European origins of our institutions, had inveighed against a provincial Americanism. In 1893 Turner was still more interested in national unity than in conflict and diversity.
