AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY Summer 2007, Vol. 120, No. 2, pp. 303–323 © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois History of Psychology ALFRED H. FUCHS, editor Bowdoin College RAND B. EVANS, action editor East Carolina University Johns Hopkins’s first professorship in philosophy: A critical pivot point in the history of American psychology Christopher D. Green York University The first professorship in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University was contested in the early 1880s by two of the most prominent and influential scholars in America: Charles Sanders Peirce and George Sylvester Morris. A third figure also vied for the position, although he was much less well known at the time: Granville Stanley Hall. Through a series of unexpected circumstances, Hall ultimately won the professorship and then used it to leverage an extraordinary career that included his opening the first American research laboratory in psychology, establishing the American Journal of Psychology, becoming president of Clark University, founding the American Psychological Association, and profoundly affecting the character of developmental psychology in America. Johns Hopkins University (JHU) was unlike any other school in America when it opened in 1876. It was nondenominational, it demanded that its faculty be productive researchers, its primary intellectual focus was science, and its major pedagogical priority was graduate education. It is often said that it followed the German model of the university at a time when most American colleges emphasized inculcating denominational dogmatics in the sons of America’s gentry. In fact, however, the president of the new university, Daniel Coit Gilman, studied a wide variety of European models and claimed that he had decided not to follow any one of them but to integrate the best of what he found in Europe with American traditions (Hawkins, 1960). In the history of psychology, Johns Hopkins is known chiefly for hav- ing been the place where Granville Stanley Hall founded, in 1883, the first American research laboratory dedicated to experimental psychology (William James’s earlier demonstration laboratory at Harvard notwith- standing) and where he launched the American Journal of Psychology (AJP)