Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr. (born February 27, 1888 in Xenia , Ohio , † October 30, 1965 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American historian . He is considered a pioneer of the historical sub-areas of social history and urban history and an important thinker of the progressive movement.

Life

Schlesinger's father, Bernhard Schlesinger, was a Prussian Jew, his mother, Kate Feurle, was a Catholic from Austria . They both converted to Protestantism and emigrated to the USA in 1872, where they settled in Xenia, Ohio.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. was born in Xenia. He studied at Ohio State University , where he graduated in 1910. He did his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University , where he was influenced by Herbert L. Osgood and Charles A. Beard . He then worked as a professor at Ohio State University and the University of Iowa before receiving a professorship at Harvard University in 1924 . In 1928 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1941 to the American Philosophical Society . Schlesinger taught at Harvard University for three decades until his retirement in 1954.

His son Arthur (1917–2007) also became a well-known historian.

Ideas

Schlesinger was a pioneer in the historical areas of social history and city history. He emphasized material causes (such as the pursuit of economic profit or conflicts between industry and peasantry) as the mainspring for historical change, while he attached little importance to ideas and ideologies. He was the supervisor for Ph.D. - Dissertations at Harvard University . Through this position, which he held for three decades, he exerted great influence, especially in the sub-areas of social, women's and immigration history.

As a pioneer of social history, the focus of historical studies on politics and political classes, as prevailed at the beginning of his academic career, was a grievance. In 1922 he commented disapprovingly: "If you read the story from the textbooks, one could assume that half of our population would make only an insignificant contribution to the story." To counter this impression, he and Dixon gave Ryan Fox the 13 volumes comprehensive “History of American Life” series, one of the first works with a focus on social history. These volumes, written by young historians, avoided topics such as politics and the history of the constitution and instead dealt with topics such as house building, fashion, sports, education, and cultural life.

Selected Works

• 1918: The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 , Columbia University Press, New York. on-line
• 1922: New Viewpoints in American History , The Macmillan Company, New York. on-line
• 1933: The Rise of the City, 1878–1898 , The Macmillan Company, New York.
• 1946 Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books , The Macmillan Company, New York.
• 1958: Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 , Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
• 1963: In Retrospect: The History of a Historian , Harcourt, Brace & World, New York. (Autobiography)
• 1968: Birth of the Nation: A Portrait of the American People on the Eve of Independence , Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

literature

• Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr: A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 , Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 2000, ISBN 978-0-395-70752-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Age of Schlesinger by James Chace | The New York Review of Books
2. ↑ Member History: Arthur M. Schlesinger. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 23, 2018 . 
3. ^ Marion Casey: Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States . NYU Press, 2006, p. 7.
4. ^ Leonard Dinnerstein , Kenneth T. Jackson, eds .: American Vistas: 1607-1877 . Oxford UP, 1979, p. 64.
5. ^ Mark C. Carnes: Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) . Simon and Schuster, 2004, p. 265.