Between 1895 and 1905 he was editor of The American Historical Review, AHA’s journal, to which he has also contributed with multiple critical reviews and papers, such as “Recent Memoirs of the French Directory” (1896), “The Administrative History of the British Dependencies in the Further East” (1899), and “Nationality and History” (1916). In 1896 he joined the Committee of Seven (AHA), taking part in the elaboration and publishing of the report The Study of History in Schools (1898), whose aim was to provide a set of suggestions and recommendations to improve the teaching of History in American high schools. According to the authors of the report, the teaching of the subject should not consist of the presentation of the accumulated information. It should rather stimulate students to think about the research they would work on and provide “mental equipment” that would enable them to comprehend the social and political challenges they would face as citizens. They also considered History to be a humanity, although its methodology resembles that of the natural sciences, and that it should take a central role in the school programmes.

Years later, by the occasion of the earthquake that affected the city of San Francisco in 1906, Stephens was member of the History and Statistics Subcommittee of the Committee of Fifty (1908). As president of the AHA – position he held in 1915 –, he collaborated in the organization of the Panama-Pacific Historical Congress, which took place in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto, the same year, and which was attended by historians such as Rafael Altamira and Herbert E. Bolton. At this congress, Stephens also contributed with a paper titled “The Conflict of European Nations in the Pacific Ocean”, in which he suggested that the history of the Pacific Ocean was defined in four distinct stages.

Although there is still no systematic study about the work of Henry Morse Stephens, or about his historiographical thought and practice, we think it is possible to place his first works in the 1880s. In 1885, he started collaborating on the Dictionary of National Biography, to which he wrote several entries, and published his first study dedicated to the history of Portugal in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9^th Ed.). Alongside other foreign historians of the nineteenth century, such as Heinrich Schaefer, Richard H. Major or Raymond Beazley, Stephens revealed a very particular interest in Portugal, dedicating it some of his works. Even though the study published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica corresponds to a “historical synthesis”, we can find in it the central features of his reflection on the history of Portugal – features which he would later develop in The Story of Portugal (1891) and would address in a comparative perspective in “Modern Historians and Small Nationalities” (1887).

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