David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis (born May 25, 1936 in Little Rock ) is an American historian who teaches at New York University . He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize in the Biography or Autobiography category for the first and second parts of his biography of WEB Du Bois (1994 and 2001). This makes him the first author to win this award for two publications about the same person.

Lewis is engaged in comparative history research with a particular focus on the social history of the United States in the 20th century and the development of civil rights in the United States. His interest extends to the Africa of the 19th century , the France of the 20th century and the Islamic Spain .

Life

Lewis comes from a middle class Afro-American family . His father, John Henry Lewis, graduated from Morris Brown College in Atlanta and continued his education at Yale Divinity School, of which he was the first African-American graduate. He received his MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago and became Headmaster of Dunbar Junior and Senior High School and Junior College in Little Rock, Arkansas. Lewis' mother worked as a math teacher at this school. When the family lived in Little Rock, young Lewis attended a denomination school. As he got older, his parents sent him to Ohio to attend Wilberforce Preparatory School and Xenia High School. The family then moved to Atlanta, where his father became the director of Morris Brown College and Lewis attended Booker T. Washington High School. When he was 15, he graduated from college early and attended Fisk University in Nashville , Tennessee . He was accepted into the University Society Phi Beta Kappa in 1956 .

Lewis briefly attended the University of Michigan Law School , but then went to Columbia University , where he received his MA in history in 1959 . He then continued his studies at the London School of Economics , where he received his PhD in modern European history in 1962.

From 1961 to 1962 he served in the US Army in Landstuhl as psychiatric technician with the rank of Private First Class ( corporal ).

Academic career

In 1963, Lewis lectured on medieval African history at the University of Ghana . After returning to the United States, he taught at Morgan State University , the University of Notre Dame , Howard University , and the University of the District of Columbia from 1970 to 1980 , initially as an assistant professor and later as a full professor.

Lewis is the author of the first academic biography of Martin Luther King , published in 1970, less than two years after King was assassinated. His book on the Dreyfus Affair Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair was published in 1974, The Bicentennial History of the District of Columbia in 1976; and When Harlem Was in Vogue 1980. Lewis held a professorship in history at the University of California at San Diego for many years .

In 1985, Lewis took over the Martin Luther King Chair at Rutgers University , which he held for 18 years. During this time he wrote his two - volume biography of WEB Du Bois , which later won two Pulitzer prizes , as well as The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa in 1987 .

In addition to the two Pulitzer Prizes, Lewis received the Bancroft Price and the Francis Parkman Prize in 1994 for the first volume of his Du Bois biography. In 2001 he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the second volume . During the 2001 winter semester, Lewis was visiting professor of history at Harvard .

In 2003 he took over the Julius Silver Chair in History at New York University . Lewis appeared as a history expert in New York: A Documentary Film in 1999 , directed by Ric Burns for PBS . He was president of the Society of American Historians in 2002 and is co-editor of The Crisis , published by the NAACP . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society . In spring 2008 he was an Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in Berlin . Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal on February 25, 2010 . Lewis gave the opening speech on September 19, 2010 at New York University Abu Dhabi in Saudi Arabia . For 2015 he was awarded the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award .

Private

Lewis lives in Manhattan and Stanfordville, New York with his wife, Ruth Ann Stewart, who is Professor of Public Order at New York University . He has three grown children from his first marriage to Sharon Lynn Lewis: Eric Levering Lewis, Allison Lillian Lewis and Jason Bradwell Lewis. He also has a stepdaughter, Allegra Stewart.

criticism

Hannes Stein characterizes Lewis' book God's Crucible (2008) as a "black and white painting that has a lot to do with historical wishful thinking but has little to do with historiography."

Works

• Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair , William Morrow, 1974.
• District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History , WW Norton, 1976.
• King: A Critical Biography , Praeger Publishers, 1970; Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979.
• The Race for Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in The Scramble for Africa , New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, ISBN 1-55584-058-2
• When Harlem Was in Vogue , Alfred Knopf, 1981, ISBN 978-0-140-26334-3
• The Harlem Renaissance Reader (Ed.), 1994
• WEB Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 , Owl Books 1994, ISBN 978-0-805-02621-4
• WEB Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 , Owl Books 2001, ISBN 978-0-805-06813-9
• (with Deborah Willis ) A Small Nation of People: WEB Du Bois & African American Portraits of Progress , HarperCollins, 2003, ISBN 978-0-060-81756-5
• God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 , New York: WW Norton & Company , 2008, ISBN 978-0-393-33356-5
• The Implausible Wendell Wilkie: Leadership Ahead of Its Time in Walter Isaacson (Ed.) Profiles in Leadership , WW Norton & Company, 2011, ISBN 978-0-393-07655-4

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} "David Levering Lewis" ( Memento of the original from May 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , The History Makers 
2. ↑ ^{a b} "David Levering Lewis" ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Organization of American History  
3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from September 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Faculty of Arts and Sciences, New York University  
4. ↑ Hannes Stein: If only we had become Muslims. Die Welt, February 2, 2008, accessed March 17, 2015 . 

Web links

• "WEB DuBois as a Historical Novelist" Audio recording: David Levering Lewis at the Key West Literary Seminar , 2009, (engl.)
• "Pulitzer Prize for Biography: David Levering Lewis" , with Gwen Ifill, PBS Newshour, April 23, 2001,
• Lewis On How Harlem Became A Place For African Americans , PBS WNET, New York, (engl.)
• Interview with Lewis on WEB Dubois: The Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 , 1994, (engl.)
• Interview with Lewis , In Depth , C-SPAN , 2008,