Eli A. Whitney, first Chairman of the Tutorial Board, from "History & Literature" in the Fields of Concentration Handbook, 1928
My first experience with History & Literature's documented history took place in November of 2005 in the Harvard Archives in Pusey Library. Preliminary searches for "History & Literature" yielded scattered results; among these were two audio tapes labeled "Elliott Perkins, 1987." Set up with a large, archaic-looking tape recorder and a pair of tremendous headphones by the very serious and wonderful Archives staff, I opened a fresh document on my computer to take notes and pressed play. "Mr. Merriman used to do what I am doing now," Perkins, Professor of History, Lowell House Master, and former Chairman of History & Literature (1943-1951) began, referring to one of the concentration's founders and one of its most beloved teachers: "come to the sophomore meeting in the fall of the year and tell the sophomores and the tutors who were there how History & Lit started and why it started." On confirming that this introductory meeting would be recorded, he said, "I'm rather pleased because oral history has a short span, you see." Without discounting oral history's importance, Perkins has a point. Luckily, his words and, just as importantly, his dry and thoughtful tone are perfectly preserved in these tapes and in two pale, mimeographed-and-then-photocopied (and thus even paler) drafts of his speech uncovered in his archives. It has been my privilege to spend the semester in these and other archives, building on Perkins' and Merriman's histories to create a comprehensive narrative of the concentration's history.
Some notes on the construction of this narrative: with the annual end-of-year party in the recent past, our freshest associations with History & Literature are the voices of current (and departing) members of the program, including Jill Lepore (Chair 2005-), Steve Biel (former Director of Studies), and Karen Flood (former Assistant Director of Studies), as well as seniors, tutors, and underclassmen just beginning to understand what History & Literature may come to mean to them. It is for this reason that I have included perhaps a surfeit of long quotations in this paper, to set contemporary ideas of the program in conversation with ideas of years past, and to let those ideas come through, wherever possible, as originally written. While sources ranging from letters to course catalogues to minutes from meetings of the Committee on Degrees to statements from Head Tutors are diverse in content and style, they address consistently similar questions: what does it mean to call a program "History & Literature," and how should that program live up to its name?
Certain names recur, those of people like Elliott Perkins who at some point in their tenure took time to set out the program's content or purpose in particularly useful terms. Barrett Wendell, the "Founding Father" of History & Literature, is one such individual; Chairman Sterling Dow (1955-1960) is another. In some cases, figures are highlighted simply because their words are both preserved and accessible. The same is true of many dates: 1956-7 is used to illustrate concentration requirements in the 1950s, for example, because a photocopy of that year's stipulations were helpfully located in a folder entitled "Field of Hist & Lit Rules."
The original idea for History & Literature was proposed at a now legendary dinner at Boston's Tavern Club in 1906, hosted by the future first Chairman, Barrett Wendell '77 (1906-1917). "Wendell is really our patron saint," explained Perkins in 1987, and it is true that in his own work and in his teaching Wendell was uniquely articulate about the need to study literature, his specialty, in historical and cultural context. While over time those affiliated with the concentration have reiterated that neither history nor literature should serve purely as context for the other, Wendell's idea that the two should be studied together shaped the concentration from the start. Eleven years after that founding dinner, Wendell would provide an explanation for his work with the program in an address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters:
Aside from betraying Wendell's bias toward the history and literature of the Continent (Wendell was also a tremendous Anglophile), his speech reveals the founders' belief that a program like History & Literature was an important example in their era's pedagogical debates about the purpose and character of higher education. When Charles Eliot, President of Harvard at the concentration's inception, ascended to his post in 1869, he set to work to "break the rigidity of a curriculum that consisted mostly of required courses." "It took him 15 years to achieve full success," Perkins told sophomores more than eight decades later, "but by 1884 he had produced something as close to absolute liberty, in choice and performance, as any but total anarchists could wish for." While this system did have a few requirements—including English, composition, language, chemistry, and physics—students also had 13 electives that could be chosen "any old way that appealed to [them]." At this time, there were no theses, and "of course, no Generals, for Generals require a planned program." According to Perkins, student surveys showed "with remarkable frankness…that few took much account of content when choosing courses. Convenience of hours and reputed ease of grading were what counted."
Along with respect for courses' content, also missing at Harvard in the estimation of the founders was sufficient esteem for honors work at the college level. Operating in accordance with what was perhaps a national sentiment that college should be viewed as preparation for graduate study, in Eliot's last annual report, he urged the adoption of a three-year college program "to save the college." The next President, A. Lawrence Lowell, a government professor and another of History & Literature's founding members, responded by vetoing this plan, echoing the founders' sentiments in his inaugural address when he said: "The most vital measure for saving the College is not to shorten its duration, but to ensure that it shall be worth saving." Lowell's method of doing this was to expand what had become, by 1909, the program of History & Literature.
Besides Wendell and Lowell, the guest list at the Tavern Club included F. N. Robinson '91, a Professor of English who, in Perkins' words, "made Chaucer live for generations of students, undergraduate and graduate." Charles Haskins was "one of the greatest of the medievalists," "always up to his neck in his own research and the training of graduate students, and always in over his head with his undergraduate tutoring on top of it." Chester Noyes Greenough '98 taught English literature and composition. Roger B. Merriman '96 taught history, and would become the first master of Eliot House. Also present were two undergraduates, Frederick Schenck and Harold Edgell, of the Class of 1909. Both young men went on to concentrate in History & Literature—Schenck would become one of the program's first tutors, and Edgell would eventually sit on the Committee on Degrees.
Another aspect of the founders' mission to address the "deplorable condition of education" at Harvard College was their staunch commitment to undergraduates, commitment that remains a hallmark of History & Literature today. As Perkins wrote in a draft of one of his histories of the concentration, "We are not a department, we have no graduate students. We are the Committee on Degrees in H & L [sic], and our sole concern is teaching undergraduates."
Thus, it was with a commitment to reform and to undergraduates that the founders went forth to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in late April of 1906. Their "Proposed Plan for the Degree with Distinction in History and Literature" was accepted by FAS on April 24, with Wendell, Lowell, Haskins, Merriman, Greenough, and another colleague, Schofield, comprising the first Committee on Degrees. Their proposal articulated a theme that Wendell would reiterate in his speech to the Academy of Arts and Letters: not only should history and literature be studied together, they should be broadly defined—according to the plan's language, understood "in their most comprehensive sense."
As for the rest of the proposal, students were expected to put together "some general scheme of study of the history and the literature either of a nation or of a period," for example,
The "comprehensive sense" with which students were expected to understand history and literature is outlined quite specifically: "The candidate will normally be expected to divide his work about equally between courses in History and courses in Literature; but will ordinarily include, either in courses taken or in outside reading, the history of Philosophy and of the Fine Arts in the country or the period selected for his general field of study." The proposal outlined the kind of reading students were to do—general reading in the "principal authors" of the country or period and in the "works of standard authorities concerning these matters." This emphasis on the principal authors and standard authorities was quite characteristic of History & Literature for much of the twentieth century; it is only in the last few decades that the concentration's conception of the "canon" has begun to expand (an expansion concurrent with similar paradigm shifts at universities across the country). Another component of the 1906 proposal was the idea that general reading "may conveniently be done during summer vacation." The founders understood a concentration in History & Literature as an extra effort "apart from the course taken in College." Finally, the proposal included two ideas that would become pillars of the program: first, that a candidate for the degree with distinction would present a thesis on a previously approved subject, and second, that an undergraduate would undergo general examinations, "either written or oral, or both—concerning his whole field of study."
Although Lowell was appointed interim Chairman in the spring of 1906, Barrett Wendell served as the concentration's acting Chairman the following fall and continued as Chairman until 1917. The first class graduated in 1909; that year, a short treatise entitled "Memoranda for the Use of Candidates for the Degree with Distinction in History and Literature" notes that successful candidates (like Schenck and Edgell) were "expected to familiarize themselves with their chosen fields in four ways":
Methods (c) and (d) were intended to "bind…together" and "fill gaps" left by college courses. As for the "extensive" reading of "standard literature," the treatise suggests that such texts should be "copiously read rather than minutely studied."
In 1911, the number of courses required for a degree in History & Literature was raised from 6 full courses to 8. In 1917, art historian Chandler Post succeeded Wendell as the second Chairman of the program, leading the concentration until 1924, when he ceded his seat to Merriman (1924-1930). By this time, President Lowell had succeeded in requiring all students to undertake a plan of concentration.
To facilitate the selection of concentrations, the College offered a Fields of Concentration Handbook in which History & Literature was listed among other fields including Anthropology, Biochemical Sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Classics, Economics, Engineering Sciences, English, Fine Arts, Geology, German, Government, History, Mathematics, Music, Philosophy, Physics, Psychology, Romance Languages, and Sociology. In the 1928 edition of this text, Chester Greenough wrote the brief treatise on the system of concentrations itself, suggesting how far the College had come since Eliot's days of "anarchy": "To be kept from choosing at random sixteen courses out of the three hundred or more offered at Harvard is to be protected against the very real danger of having a Freshman's knowledge about many things but not a Senior's knowledge about anything," Greenough begins. "This is so generally realized that there is little need to argue the advantages of having at least one third of one's courses constitute a kind of picture…." He goes on to offer much of the same advice that students receive today: "The choice of a field of concentration should not be made without some reference to the work that one is to do after graduation, [but] it is probably a mistake to suppose that the best preparation for a profession is, in every case, to concentrate in that field which is most directly related to the profession." "Last of all," Greenough concludes, "a man should seriously ask himself what he really likes to do best. That outweighs all other considerations altogether."
A man who thought that History and Literature might be what he liked best turned in this Handbook to the chapter on "History and Literature," a short but thoughtful tract written by Eli A. Whitney, long-time Chairman of the Tutorial Board (a position later called Head Tutor, and today known as Director of Studies). Whitney positions the efforts of History & Literature within a tradition no less venerated than the scholarship of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He points out that whereas in earlier times "it was possible for a diligent and brilliant student to cover nearly all branches of human knowledge and to be proficient in several of the arts," "the pendulum has swung to the other extreme" and Americans are now living in "an age of specialization, [even] overspecialization." History & Literature, according to Whitney, was established to find the middle ground between these two extremes.
In this and subsequent editions of the handbook, Whitney answers the question "why study history and literature together?" After assuring the prospective concentrator that this question is not at all "unnatural," he asks rhetorically,
Whitney then makes a point that future Chair James Engell (1989-1994) would echo nearly 80 years later: "The literature and history of a period are so closely interwoven that it is almost impossible to separate them—in fact until our day, no one has tried to separate them." "This is not a field which attempts to straddle two other departments," Whitney concludes, "it is an entity in itself."
Although in many ways the idea that History & Literature is an entity in itself lies at the heart of the concentration's mission, the exact meaning of Whitney's statement is up for debate. "One of the great tutors once spent 45 minutes principally on the ‘and' in History and Literature," Elliott Perkins remembered, speaking of longtime tutor Daniel Sargeant. This is impressive, but there has been significantly more conversation on the matter than that. The need to define the exact terms of the relationship between history and literature—or to admit that there is no one way to put the two together, as the concentration easily admits today—recurs throughout the concentration's history. Chairman Sterling Dow felt especially strongly about the program's definition:
In "History and Literature: Content and Purpose" (1959), Dow tells a history of the program that, as he understands it, never sought to teach "History and Literature united at any level. On the contrary, at all times several valued members of the staff have been scholars with training, capacity, and interest in one discipline only; and no university can ever offer permanencies to any large percentage of synthesizers of discipline."
He goes on to state baldly that while
Dow felt that the two disciplines truly came together at the level of the student's mental development and written work. At the same time, while he did not believe that the disciplines should be kept completely separate, he suggests that "in the past we have failed not seldom, I think, to help our students attain real excellence in either discipline because of a desire somehow to ‘integrate' the subject-matter of the two disciplines at any cost." Despite this note of caution, Dow ends optimistically, pointing out that "the high quality of numbers of our students [who study Classics], easily [surpasses] in several instances the quality of the best in straight Classics, [and] proves that History & Literature, however united, can be a superior field of study."
A few of the elements of this "superior" program remain unchanged since Dow's days, since Whitney's, since even Wendell's: the emphasis on the thesis, for example, and the organizing principle of tutorials. As many elements, however, have been subject to perennial debate and occasional modification, including the requirements for a degree with distinction, the special fields within the concentration, the tutorial system, community within the concentration, its structure, and its location.
The 1912 edition of the Notes on the Choice of Electives, which predates the Handbook and was likely part of Lowell's attempt to phase the language of the free elective system into the language of concentrations, lists only the most basic of requirements for a degree with distinction: "Six [full] courses in History and Literature, making a special study of some one nation or period. Four of these courses must be in History, or in some one literary department. The plan should be approved in detail by Professor Wendell." As this description is sparer than the proposal submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, it can be assumed that the Committee laid out further specifications in other materials on the program.
The 1916 version of the same text more clearly spelled out the interdisciplinary potential of the concentration: "For one or two of [the six courses on a specific period or country], approved courses in Fine Arts or Philosophy may be substituted." By that year, the expectation outlined in the original proposal that degree candidates pass general examinations had been written into the official requirements of the concentration. In 1920, the program's description was expanded again: the oral component of the general examination was limited to the student's special field, and the written component was to be on "twelve plays of Shakespeare and twelve books of the Bible."
Among the examinations traditionally administered to concentrators (and the one that seemed to have been most regularly up for review) was the junior exam. In 1959, the Committee on Degrees exchanged a one-day format for a two-day version intended "to enable the examination to test more fully the whole range of a student's competence in his field." Under this system, the first day called for a one-hour essay on one historical and one literary passage, and the second day called for a two-hour essay. The longer essay was dropped in 1970 under Chairman John Clive, and the exam was shortened to one day. A sophomore exam with a similar design was also introduced that year. Sophomores were given extensive comments on their exam, but their performance did not count toward their degrees.
A written exam for seniors was a standard feature of the concentration well into the 1990s. In fact, together with concentration course grades and the honors essay, this exam constituted fully one-third of students' degree recommendations. While the oral examination served as another means of assessment, it was not weighted on the same scale. Today, the written senior examination has been abandoned, and it is the oral exam that serves as the third element of evaluation. As described in the current "Handbook for Concentrators," the oral exam "tests the student's mastery of the field and ability to combine history and literature in imaginative and thoughtful ways," taking questions from the student's thesis and from his or her field as a whole, as well as from a topics list and bibliography drawn up by the student for the examination.
Although written and oral exams and theses have been mandatory components of honors degrees in History & Literature since the program's earliest days, in decades past a larger portion of students graduated each year without honors. Until 1970, a qualifying examination was offered in the spring to all juniors who wished to stand for honors in their senior year. Only juniors who passed this exam would write a thesis and take orals. Students who did not elect to stand for honors took a written exam in the spring of senior year and graduated with a non-honors degree. As the concentration was founded in part as a response to the perceived disregard for honors at the college level, it is not surprising that the concentration tracked the number of honors candidates carefully and noted increases with pride. In 1936, for example, the qualifying exam was taken by 85 to 90 percent of the junior class, with the result that the number of "accredited Senior honors candidates" reached 60 percent, the greatest number to that date. Some forty years later, however, legislation of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences concerning concentration admissions would force History & Literature to reconsider not only its admissions policies, but the relationship between those policies and the work demanded of its students.
In 1977, FAS mandated "open" admissions to the more selective concentrations, including History & Literature. Prior to that date, History & Literature had operated with at least three standards of admission. Admission in the early years appears to have been unrestricted. In 1931, rising numbers of applicants together with staff and budgetary constraints caused members of the Committee on Degrees to ask FAS to allow them to limit the size of admitted Harvard classes to fifty men. At that time, a "Radcliffe quota" limited the number of women in the concentration to fifteen per year. The female quota and the concentration cap remained in place through the years immediately following World War II. By the 1950s, the concentration cap was abandoned, and incoming class size was left to the discretion of the Chairman and the Committee on Degrees. But in 1977, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed legislation which read, in part, that "every concentration program presented for undergraduates shall be available to every freshman who wishes to enter that program." This meant that in order to maintain the high standard achieved by candidates eligible for honors in History & Literature, the concentration would have to make clear that such work was expected of all students admitted to the program. Fortunately, the new legislation left room for this kind of rigor, stating that freshmen would have to meet "the specific entrance requirements set by the concentration," and allowing that "concentration programs may be limited exclusively to honors candidates." Today, all seniors in History & Literature are expected to take an oral exam and write a thesis, and most students graduate from History & Literature with honors degrees.
As preparation for the senior thesis, the junior essay was instituted in 1970. A sophomore essay had been in place since the 1950s. Today, the sophomore essay, like its junior counterpart, is graded Honors, High Honors, or Recommended for Review.
In addition to preparing essays and theses and studying for written and oral exams, History & Literature concentrators have long been asked to do additional reading outside of their tutorial work—reading from Shakespeare and the Bible, as mentioned earlier, but also from ancient literary sources and historians. A student in the 1920s would be expected to "make himself familiar with the works of one ancient historian (Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, or Tacitus) and of one ancient author not an historian (Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace)." Seeking well-rounded students, during the same period the Committee required that a candidate concentrating in the ancient field pursue study of one modern historian (Gibbon, Macaulay, Prescott, Parkman, Ranke, Michelet, or Guizot) and one non-historian (Dante, Cervantes, Chaucer, Milton, Moliere, or Goethe). Students would be tested on these with an oral examination in the fall of their Junior year. By the 1950s, this outside reading was done in a more specific context:
In 1961 and for several decades afterward, the historian chosen by the concentration was Thucydides.
Further degree requirements vary by student, for History & Literature is comprised of "special fields," areas of study with geographical, temporal, or thematic specifications. The fields offered in History & Literature have remained surprisingly stable. The fields initially imagined by the concentration's founders were Greece, Rome, England, France, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century, and the Nineteenth Century. The Twentieth Century had obviously scarcely begun—specializing in this area would have been unthinkable. And it would not be until after World War II that America was offered on its own apart from England. Only students with mastery of three languages (including English) were allowed to specialize in the Nineteenth Century.
The Latin America field was introduced in the late 1920s. This field initially included the history and literature of Spain from 1492 to 1825. Students who wished to focus more exclusively on Spain had the option of studying Latin America "only incidentally." Prompted, perhaps, by America's Cold War entanglement with Russia, that country became a special field in 1949. And by the 1950s, the heyday of the American Civilization graduate program at Harvard, the relationship of the England and America fields had undergone a curious reversal: now it was England that "may be included in the American field" (and "must be included by those whose special topic is the earlier period of American history"), not the other way around. Today, the special fields include America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Latin America, the Middle Ages, Europe from 1300 to 1750, and Post-Colonial Studies (an option as of fall 2004), as well as selected combinations of these fields. While Africa is not an official field, there are several students currently focusing on America and Africa in their tutorials.
Tutorials are offered by the Tutorial Board, which originated as a collection of faculty members who volunteered to supervise students' independent reading and to advise them in selecting courses that formed an integrated program of history and literature. When Perkins entered the concentration in 1920, there were just six or eight sophomores and two tutors. By 1930, however, the concentration had grown to about twenty students and six tutors. From 1946 to 1958, the size of the concentration increased from 152 students to 202 students. At the same time, the number of tutors quadrupled, greatly reducing the teaching load of each tutor. It can be expected that during these years the character of tutorial instruction changed, shifting from supervision of largely independent student reading to a more collective effort of student and tutor. In the late 1960s, Elliott Perkins expressed his reservations about this change, citing a description of the tutorial program from 1929 that included the following line: "[tutors] may ask for essays or bring students together in groups for consultation, but all reading with tutors is voluntary, and courses remain a first charge on the student's time." Somewhat whimsically, Perkins identifies himself with this earlier time: "Like the dodo, I have long been rare—now, of course, I am extinct—but, stuffed if you like, I represent something that was once normality." Despite tutorial's history as a voluntary institution, however, the founders' insistence on rigorous, honors-level work makes it clear that from the earliest days students were expected to perform up to high standards.
Perkins described one aspect of the tutor's task in this way:
On the other hand, as indicated by the high number of History & Literature graduates who have found homes in academia, tutors often served as important role models for students considering that path. Perkins himself quoted Charles Haskins, one of the founders renowned for his passion for teaching, when he said, "Graduate students aren't men, they're mice. The cure for this is to get into the colleges and catch the men while they're young and inspire them with a love of learning and the idea of teaching." Perkins continued in his own words, "Catch them when they're young, teach them right, bring them along, and then, some of them will spark and you'll have something coming up."
Eli A. Whitney expressed similar sentiments about the tutorial system, particularly in conjunction with the general exam:
Further definitions of tutorial abound. In 1926-1927, History & Literature's entry in the Fields of Concentration Handbook suggested that "tutors will seek especially to aid students in developing habits of profitable reading, independent thinking, and scholarly methods." In a similar vein, Chairman of the Tutorial Board F.O. Matthiessen wrote in December of 1936 that "we teach our students to realize early in their career that the courses they take are not their field of study: that field can be defined only by their own thought and by abundant reading for their tutors." Acknowledging History & Literature's position as "one of the principle centers of the study of the humanities at Harvard," Matthiessen went on to assert the concentration's place as one of the models for tutorial work, too, noting that the concentration "has tried continually to experiment with every promising phase of the tutorial method, and to develop each valuable discovery to the full." Many of the discoveries made along the way had to do with "the care and feeding of the tutors," to use a phrase of Perkins'; on this subject perennial questions included, "How heavily should a tutor be loaded?" "What dispositions should be made to ensure him of fair chance for his own advancement, at home or elsewhere?" "What should be the relation between tutorial work and work in courses?" "How is the tutor trained and kept on his toes?"
A 1961 pamphlet for concentrators describes tutorial conferences as "the essential part of concentration in History and Literature." It is explained that "conferences are intended to supplement work done in courses. Attention will be given to method—to literary form, to historical criticism, to accuracy to interpretation. There will also be discussion of the larger aspects of events and writings, and the history of ideas." By 1961, juniors and seniors were expected to meet in tutorial once a week; sophomores were expected to meet once every two weeks. Different from today, it seems that at this time the sophomore tutorial was still a one-on-one event. In 1968, a group of sophomores and tutors met to discuss various aspects of tutorial, particularly the fall "seminars" that had been held for groups of sophomores. An account of that meeting (likely written by a tutor present) made the following reflections:
Elaborating on the "shortcomings" of the seminars, the sophomores and tutors offered the following "substantive and reasonable objections," asking for
An additional suggestion was to offer sophomore tutorial as a year-long course. Since "students already seem to be working as if it were," one idea raised was to give the first semester over to "well-planned group meetings"; presumably, the second semester would consist of the individual tutorial already familiar to students and tutors. Sophomore tutorial officially became a full-year course in the fall of 1970.
By the end of the following decade, sophomore concentrators spent the year in group tutorials taught jointly by two tutors, the format that exists today. The effort to bring sophomores together in occasional seminars and eventually in year-long tutorials was consistent with History & Literature's attention to the need for community within a program that placed a high value on independent learning. In 1926-7, students gathered informally twice a month on Thursday evenings at 8 p.m. at 65 Sparks Street: on such occasions "an opportunity [was] given for students to meet members of the Committee and the Tutors, and from time to time other members of the Faculty [were] present." In 1936, F. O. Matthiessen wrote of a number of collective events held by the concentration, including a meeting for new sophomores in the fall, and a gathering in the winter "at which the half dozen most promising Sophomores read essays in competition for the Barrett Wendell Prize."
While the main purpose of these events was to "build up the sense that a field of concentration is a cooperative enterprise, and [...] enable the students to become acquainted with the various tutors and members of the Committee," leaders of History & Literature also used these occasions to engage students with the pedagogical issues at stake in their program. To this end, in the 1930s, the concentration held a meeting every spring "to explain the purpose of the Bible and Shakespeare and Ancient Authors examinations," and in the fall for Seniors "to debate the nature of the honors essay."
In 1969, Chairman John Clive (1965-1972, 1978-1979) wrote a memo describing a meeting of Committee members and tutors where it was agreed that "early in the fall there should be held a series of discussions by field involving students, tutors, and Committee members, in the course of which curricula and other questions could be talked about." As for the style of the discussions, those present agreed that the informal character of the Sparks House gatherings and the sherry hours long associated with the concentration should be their guide: "there was universal agreement that these groups should not be set up as official committees, but that it would be far preferable to retain an informal structure and atmosphere."
Other efforts to brings students together included a series of non-credit thesis-oriented seminars for seniors beginning in 1970. These seminars were reborn in 2005-2006 as a pair of "thesis collectives" in which small groups of seniors read and commented on each other's chapter drafts under the advisement of a member of the Tutorial Board. "Junior Colloquia" also began in 1970; as suggested in a letter to concentrators that fall, "in most fields tutors [combined] tutorials with other tutors occasionally for colloquia on fixed topics of general interest to the student's field as a whole."
Today, the junior seminar is the element of the program that most closely resembles the old Colloquia. The description in the current handbook notes that "each year's seminar centers on the work of a visiting scholar to History & Literature. Juniors read a required text and gather in small groups, moderated by tutors. They are also required to write discussion questions and/or a short essay on the relation(s) between the work under consideration and their own course of study." This iteration of the junior collective was formalized under Chair Stephen Greenblatt (2000-2002). "When I came in, we had almost no collective activities," Greenblatt recalled in a recent interview. "I started collecting lists of texts from all the tutors, [asking] what are the absolutely key texts that every student in Hist & Lit should read [so that] we could get a sense of [how] our common intellectual orientation was formed. And then I tried to construct around that a set of common readings and visits [for which] the entire concentration comes together." While attempting to maintain a careful balance of individual work and group reflection—"the trick here is not to impose on the liberty of the individual tutorials," he says—Greenblatt forged community not only among students but among tutors, as well. "I tried to create a sense that the tutors not only had a shared institutional life, but also had a shared intellectual life. So when we had each of these visits, I used those and the readings that we did as occasions for [the tutors to] meet without the students, and have a serious debate or argument or long-term discussion [with each other]."
The speaker series would be further modified by the next Chair, Homi Bhabha (2002-2005), who worked with a donor to introduce Hist & Lit's speakers to the greater community. The idea, in Bhabha's words, was to make History & Literature "a kind of university-wide platform. This was an attempt to take Hist & Lit into the center of the campus." Today speakers usually participate in three events: an informal lunch with tutors and professors; a talk for History & Literature concentrators; and a public lecture or reading.
"Tutorial seminars," semester-long courses initially under the designation of junior tutorial (History & Literature 98), represented another variation on the Junior Colloquia. Introduced in 1970 as "tutorial courses for credit offered only within History and Literature and taught by members of the Committee or tutors in the field," these seminars were "generally… taught as small undergraduate seminars with about six to twelve students in each." Early seminars included "American Social History: Problems of Historical Consciousness 1820-1990," "Literature and Social Change," and "Religious Currents in England 1700-1900" (offered in 1970-1971) and "James and Proust" and the "Sublime in America" (offered in 1974-1975). Today called "91rs," these courses are a high point of their History & Literature experience for many concentrators. 91rs in 2005-2006 included "History and Literature of the Modern American South" and "Stories of Slavery and Freedom in the Modern Atlantic World."
Today, three groups share the administration of the concentration: the Board of Tutors, the Committee on Instruction, and the Committee on Degrees. As the Tutorial Board is described in the current handbook, "the reputation for excellence in teaching that History and Literature has built over the years is largely due to the conscientious effort of this extremely able group."
What is now called the Committee on Instruction was established in the spring of 1956 as the Board of Examiners under Chairman Sterling Dow. Originally, the "principle purpose" of this group was writing and reading the junior qualifying exams. By the following year, however, their duties had clearly expanded: "In History and Literature, the four Examiners are really the leaders," wrote Dow in a memo dated May 14, 1957. "During this year they have given much help with a new 5-page brochure about senior theses. They have been the first people to deal with numerous questions of administration which are also questions of policy. They will have a leading voice in the attempt we are making to improve the 19th century fields so that they will not be a catch-all for lazy students, but will be clear and rational areas for education."
The Committee on Degrees is comprised of junior and senior faculty members from various departments connected to History & Literature. "Theirs is the final decision on policy," reads the current handbook. Despite the growth of the Tutorial Board over the decades, the program has emphasized throughout its history the importance of close contact between undergraduates and members of the Committee on Degrees.
History & Literature was originally located in Grays Hall in Harvard Yard. Perkins associated Grays Hall with his decision to join the concentration. As he told it, upon hearing that Perkins was planning to concentrate in History, a friend said, "Oh don't do that. You'll have much more fun, in History and Lit […] It's a nicer field, you'll have nice people." "So," Perkins continued, "we walk over to the old Hist and Lit office in Grays 18… and then I was Hist and Lit!"
The concentration's next move appears to have been to 10 Holyoke, in Holyoke House, a former dorm located on the site where the Holyoke Center stands today. In 1958, with plans for the latter still in development, History & Literature was faced with the opportunity to move to Boylston Hall "on the fourth floor at the northeast corner, its darkest corner." "All of the rooms are decidedly odd in respect to design," Dow commented, "but it cannot be helped." The other option was to remain in Holyoke House and to transfer to new and unknown quarters in the Holyoke Center when they were prepared. In a final vote of the Committee on Degrees the following January, five were in favor of the Boylston move, ten were opposed, and seven abstained. Soon thereafter, the concentration relocated to offices in the Holyoke Center.
In 1981, History & Literature moved to 14 Quincy Street, the former Varsity Club building adjacent to the Faculty Club. And in 1997, the concentration exchanged homes once again for the newly renovated Barker Center, along with other humanities departments including English, Religion, and African and African American Studies.
My most recent experience with Hist & Lit's documented history was the week before Commencement, when I made a final visit to the Harvard Archives. By then, Archives staff members, particularly the ever-helpful Barbara Meloni, Kyle DeCicco-Carey, and Michelle Gachette, were quite familiar with my call slips for old course catalogues and FAS records. On this occasion, I was pressed for time and had to make the very non-standard request to take my own digital picture of a photograph of Old Grays Hall. Even though this required the noisy adjustment of the Archives' window blinds to let in the right amount of light, I was assisted by the staff with patience and good humor. Leaving the Archives for the last time, I felt a real sadness that my season of intimate acquaintance with History & Literature's history (and literature) had come to an end. Since then, to combat (and to revel in) my burgeoning nostalgia for my days in Hist & Lit, I have fixed my mind on one quotation and a certain date.
The quotation is the excerpt from Eli A. Whitney's 1928 description of the concentration offered at the beginning of this paper. "The field of History & Literature is designed primarily for those men, who have, shall we say, a philosophic turn of mind," Whitney wrote. "At all events, they must be interested in cause and effect, they must have the capacity and background to see the inter-relation of events, and must be possessed of sufficient imagination to apply the lessons of the Past to the problems of the Future." Remembering Whitney, I first hoped, rather grandly, that with this history I was turning his description of prospective students on Hist & Lit itself. I hoped I was providing an opportunity for Hist & Lit to look to the lessons of the past. It didn't take much distance from the project to see, however, that what I had actually provided was proof that History & Literature has always looked to its past.
For what elements of the program are taken to be at its core today? Most concentrators would point to the selection of a field or fields; the small-group tutorial in sophomore year; the individual tutorial in junior year; the senior thesis and orals examination; and the concentration-wide speaker series. Yet, as this paper has shown, over the course of the concentration's history, these very features have been discussed and dismantled, reorganized and reconceived. Indeed, F.O. Matthiessen's assertion that the concentration "has tried continually to experiment with every promising phase of the tutorial method, and to develop each valuable discovery to the full" can be applied far beyond tutorial.
And in the spirit of moving far beyond tutorial, I look forward to October 14, 2006, when past and present members of the concentration will come together for History & Literature's Centennial Celebration. We are calling this celebration "Beyond the Gates." Distinguished graduates of the program range from Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. '38 to author and columnist Frank Rich '71, and one of the day's highlights will be a panel from which these and other graduates will speak about what History & Literature has meant to their lives and their careers. Yet while it is appropriate that the focus of the celebration be the diverse achievements of Hist & Lit graduates in their years after Harvard, I expect that what will bring former concentrators back are fond memories of the program itself: memories of tutorial, of their theses, of tutors who challenged and changed them, of a rigorous program built on the principle of devoted attention to undergraduates…memories of Holyoke House, of the Holyoke Center, of the Barker Center, and of each other.