ABSTRACT
History in the United States was a social science, one of the group of disciplines that gave professional form to the study of the life of man in society. But its practitioners, regarding themselves as custodians of the record of the human past, believed that their role was distinctive. Economics, sociology, and political science treated institutionally distinct subject matters in a fashion that was basically analytical; history was a foundation for them all. The discipline has also fallen far short of fulfilling the scientific aspirations of the 1930s. It is no simple task to equip a historian in the 1970s. In part, the difficulty of equipping the historian springs from the methodological and conceptual dependence of history upon related bodies of knowledge, a dependence frequently explained by the excuse that the discipline had only recently acquired the attributes of a science.
