Professzionalizáció és nemzeti öntudat. A Századok első évei

The birth of specialized reviews played a decisive role in the process of scientific professionalization.It was the establishment of the Hungarian Historical Society that gave the impetus to the creation of the historical review called Századok in 1867, which was the second of its kind in contemporary Europe. An atelier for the rational research of national history, it was the Századok that consequently set the norms for deciding what was regarded as part of the science of history and what was excluded from it. What promoted someone to the status of acknowledged historian was either participation in the review’s editorial work or regular publication on its pages. Thus,members of the Society and researchers publishing in Századok were turned from amateurs into professional historians. This was a fairly small group of persons with predominantly legal background,initially probably no more than ten.Characteristically, the authors publishing in Századok rarely if at all dealt with metahistorical or methodological issues, nor were they qualified to do so. Their research and publications focussed exclusively on the national past, exclusively through the research of the sources. The cultivation of national historiography was seen in terms of a kind of political obligation, expressed by the repeated statements of principles published by the leaders of the Hungarian Historical Society in the review. The present survey, limited to the editorial years of Kálmán Thaly between 1867 and 1875, examines the institutional emergence of national academical historical scholarship in Hungary.