Elie Halevy's 'Birth of Methodism' and English-Speaking Historians in the 1960s and 1970s

British and North American historians are familiar with the historical inquiry on late modern Britain written by the acclaimed French historian Elie Halevy (1870-1937) in the first half of the twentieth century. His unfinished History of the English People was translated into English from the late 1910s and widely circulated in English-spea-king academic circles. Nevertheless, one of his articles entitled 'The Birth of Methodism' which appeared in the periodical La Revue de Paris in 1906 remained little-known until it was translated by the American historian Bernard Semmel and published by University of Chicago Press in 1971. Actually, the 'Birth of Methodism' article played a seminal role in the deployment of Halevy's historical thinking and in the (almost exclusive) interest he developed for English history during his career as a professional historian. Looking at his personal archives and at British and American historiography, this article thus offers to retrace the genealogy of Halevy's conception of Methodism and the role he ascribed to this Protestant sect in the making of British mentalites. It then sets to track Semmel's enterprise and its reception amongst American historians, the latter including Gertrud Himmelfarb, Melvin Richter and Robert K. Webb. 'The Birth of Methodism' crossed the Atlantic back to Britain where it resonated with the contemporary development of Victorian religious studies as well as the works of left-wing historians Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. It also intersected with soon-to-emerge preoccupations around the articulation of religiosity and British late modern identities.