ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the discourse of four historians who visited Germany from 1877 to1909 and produced reports of their tours of universities of different German states: the Belgian Paul Fredericq, the French Charles Seignobos, the North American Herbert Baxter Adams and the Argentine Ernesto Quesada. The article discusses the meanings of seminar and method motivated by the literature on professional identity that presents the two factors as determinants in the formation of a transnational community of historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the examination of sources, it concludes that the multifaceted area of production of the German states, individual interests, governmental demands and intellectual contexts, in terms of higher education in history, triggered widely different representations of seminar, although the authors maintained a minimal body of common principles and procedures which reinforces the idea that a kind of trans-nationalization occurred in that period.
seminary; method; Germany; higher education in history