Inventing “Early Modern” Europe: Fashioning a New Historical Period in American Historiography 1880–1945

Abstract

According to perceived wisdom the term “early modern” emerged in the mid-twentieth century and only developed into a meaningful term of periodization in the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, this article shows that American historians already started to use “early modern” in a substantive way at the turn of the twentieth century. In the interwar years the term permeated all areas of professional activity from textbooks and graduate school seminars to conferences, research articles, and job descriptions. Moreover, the impetus for inventing an early modern period was neither to counter the concept of the Renaissance nor to showcase the modernizing traits of the post-Reformation centuries. Instead, “early modern” gained widespread recognition as a term denoting the non-modernity of the centuries preceding the French and Industrial Revolutions as opposed to “real” modernity thereafter.