Caroline Robbins

Ivy Caroline Robbins (born August 18, 1903 in Harmondsworth , Middlesex ( England ), † February 8, 1999 in Valley Forge , Pennsylvania , USA ) was a British historian.

Life

Robbins came from a Baptist farming family in Middlesex. Her father Rowland Richard Robbins was temporarily president of the UK National Farmers Union ; her older brother Lionel Robbins later emerged as an economist and was made Baron Robbins in 1959.

Caroline Robbins studied first at Royal Holloway College (BA 1924), then at London University , where she received her Ph. D. in 1926 with a thesis on Andrew Marvell . She then emigrated to the USA, where she was to teach until she died. She first taught at the University of Michigan (1926-27), then at Western Reserve University (1927-1928) and finally at the renowned Bryn Mawr women's college , where she shaped the department of British history until her retirement in 1971. In 1949 she was given a full professorship, and from 1957 to 1969 she was also the chair of her faculty.

In 1932 she married Joseph Herben , a professor in the Department of English Literature, but did not discard her maiden name. Although she had little to gain from political feminism , she was intensively involved in the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in the 1940s and 1950s .

Robbins' research focus was the political literature of the English Enlightenment. Her most important work, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman , was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association in 1960, and the same institution also honored her with the AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction in 1989 for her life's work . Bryn Mawr College named a chair after her after her death in 1999. London University, which had rejected her application for the title of DLitt while she was still alive (probably because Lewis Namier intrigued against her), also launched an annual series of lectures named after her in 2001 ( Caroline Robbins Lecture ).

plant

In The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman , Robbins brought back to the minds of historians a long-forgotten political current of the eighteenth century: the political philosophy of the so-called " True Whigs, " a small group of radical political pamphlet writers who vociferously opposed the Robert Walpole government . in particular John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the co-authors of the anonymously published Cato's Letters ). While the True Whigs and the closely associated Country Party in England were only a small splinter group, their thoughts fell on fertile soil in the British colonies in North America and were reprinted many times. Robbins already pointed this out, but it was left to the American historian Bernard Bailyn to trace in detail the formative influence of country ideologues on the American Revolution . In addition to Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution , JGA Pocock's work on the history of ideas draws on Robbins' pioneering work in this area.

literature

Publications

• The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies . Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1959.
• (Ed.): Two English Republican Tracts . Cambridge University Press, 1969.
• Barbara Taft (ed.): Absolute Liberty: A Selection from the Articles and Papers of Caroline Robbins . Archon Books, Hamden CN 1982. ISBN 0-208-01955-3

Secondary literature

• JR Pole: Robbins, Caroline (1903-1999) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press 2004. < http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/72015 >