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A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS
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Schevill’s most successful book was his History of Modern Europe, first published in 1898 and revised continuously until 1946. The 1925 edition reveals many of the arguments that would have informed his approach to teaching European history. Schevill believed that Europe had over a thousand years nurtured a European civilization that was perhaps the most powerful and far-reaching of world civilizations, since it included the United States within its cultural and intellectual compass. The United States was a “passionate, struggling, and inseparable element” of a larger European civilization, and this gave special urgency and authority to the project of teaching European history to young Americans.50 Yet after World War I, a war that he profoundly regretted, Ferdinand Schevill’s story of a slow but positive evolution of European civilization was vastly complicated by the ruptures of the Peace of Versailles. By the later 1920s, he was in the fascinating but also perplexing situation of having to imagine the portrait of a Europe that he viewed with both admiration and disillusionment, which could be proffered to young Americans. In the end, the course that he designed was much more of the first than the second, having little to do with a twentieth century that Schevill found dispiriting and depressing. Schevill was assisted by Arthur P. Scott, then a mid-career associate professor in History who was a departmental jack-of-all-trades, and (to a much lesser extent) by Hayward Keniston, an associate professor of Spanish philology and comparative linguistics who eventually left Chicago for the University of Michigan. A graduate of Princeton, Scott had received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1916. Scott had lived for several years in Beirut and had a special interest in the expansion of Europe. He 50. Ferdinand Schevill, A History of Europe from the Reformation to Our Own Day (New York, 1925), p. 4.