Alvin M. Josephy Jr.

Alvin M. Josephy Jr. ( May 18, 1915 in Woodmere , New York , † October 16, 2005 in Greenwich , Connecticut ) was an American journalist , historian and civil rights activist .

Alvin Josephy was born on her mother's side into a family of journalists and publishers ; his uncle Alfred A. Knopf was with the Book Company and his grandfather Samuel Knopf was a co-founder of American Mercury Magazine . After dropping out of Harvard studies (1932), he went to Hollywood and became an author at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer . He worked here, in his own words, on “idiotic scripts about dancing bras and panties”.

He only practiced this profession for a short time. This was followed by activities as a broker on Wall Street and as a foreign correspondent in Mexico (including interviewing Leon Trotsky ). During the Second World War he was used as a war correspondent for the Marine Corps in the Pacific . After the war he went back to Hollywood as a screenwriter and worked on the side for weekly newspapers in the Los Angeles area . Among other things, he developed the script for the film Stadt im stranglehold ( The Captive City , 1952, director: Robert Wise )

During this time Josephy became interested in Indian culture . In the 1950s he was the picture editor of Time Magazine and in this capacity he often traveled to the American West. Here he was often confronted with the disastrous Indian policy of Dwight D. Eisenhower . His attempts to tackle it journalistically, however, were stopped by the editor Henry Luce . He left Time Magazine in the late 1950s and became an editor at American Heritage Books , later editor of American Heritage Magazine . During this time he wrote many of his significant works on Native American history. He became the most important civil rights activist for the rights of the North American indigenous people without being an Indian himself. His influence extended to the US government. So he wrote a study for President Richard Nixon , who wanted to change Eisenhower's policy.

In the early 1990s he was the chairman of the advisory board of the Smithsonian Institution ’s National Museum of the American Indian .

Fonts

• The Patriot Chiefs (1961)
• Chief Joseph's People and Their War (1964)
• The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (1965)
• The Artist was a young man: The life story of Peter Rindisbacher , Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth 1970
• Red Power: The American Indians' Fight for Freedom (1971)
• Now That the Buffalo's Gone (1982)
• America 1492. The Indian peoples before the discovery (editor), S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992 ISBN 3-10-036712-X
• 500 nations. The illustrated history of the Indians of North America (editor), Frederking and Thaler, Munich 1996 ISBN 3-89405-356-9

Web links

• Alvin M. Josephy Jr. in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Literature by and about Alvin M. Josephy junior in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary in the Washington Post