The name of Herbert Baxter Adams, historian and teacher, has more than that of any other individual been rightly associated with the creation of the modern American historical profession. During his twenty-five years in the combined department of history, politics, and economics at the Johns Hopkins University (1876-1901), Adams came to be identified as the chief voice of the "New Historical School" which had as its aim the systematic application to American historical sources of the so-called scientific or critical approach which was the hallmark of nineteenth-century German historiography. In his famous seminar, Adams, a gifted teacher, trained a generation of professional historical scholars and authors which included such men as J. Franklin Jameson, Woodrow Wilson, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles M. Andrews, and John Spencer Bassett. The implications of such professionalization for historical writing in the United States were enormous, for by 1900 historical learning was no longer generally...