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The Adolescent Road to Historical Science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Extract
The future historian John Lothrop Motley, aged ten in 1824, wrote to his father from boarding school outside Boston: “I want to see you very much. I suppose you remember that it is my turn to come home on Saturday next? This is Thursday, the day on which we speak. I was third best…. My nose has bled very often lately, but I believe it will not bleed much more. I have had a pain in my side once or twice.” Motley's education involved intensive training in languages as part of a curriculum consisting of linguistic drill and a bit of math and science, which did not satisfy his growing thirst for reading. “In the morning, from half-past five to seven, I study French,” Motley wrote his mother a year later, “after breakfast I study Spanish, from nine to half past ten, when we go out and stay about ten or fifteen minutes; and when we come in, I study Greek until twelve, when we are dismissed; and in the afternoon I study Cicero and recite to Dr. Beck, a German.” Two years later Motley complained about the lack of reading material, asking his father for books and announcing the organization of a reading room by one of the masters. But the reading room failed to satisfy him, Motley explained to his brother, because no one contributed books and the few newspapers there were all “a hundred years old” and all mutilated within an hour of being deposited. “Reading is not to be thought of, as there are no books in school.”
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References
1 John Lothrop Motley to his father, 13 May 1824, Motley to his mother, 31 May 1825, and Motley to his brother, 26 July 1829, in The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, ed. Curtis, George William (New York, 1889), 1:1, 5, 8.Google Scholar
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21 The author thanks Barbara Herrnstein Smith for her suggestions about the adolescent experience of young historians. Her suggested revisions have been incorporated in this paragraph.Google Scholar