Perez Zagorin

Perez Zagorin (born May 29, 1920 in Chicago , † April 26, 2009 in Washington, DC ) was an American historian and professor at the University of Rochester .

biography

Zagorin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, studied history at the University of Chicago and Harvard University , where he received his master's degree in 1947 and 1952 doctorate was. During the Second World War he volunteered after the USA entered the war, but was not accepted because of poor vision and worked for the US Propaganda Department (Office of War Information) in New York. After the war he was in England for a year. He then taught at Amherst College , from 1951 to 1953 at Vassar College and from 1955 at McGill University , where he received a full professorship. During his time in Canada he was also in Great Britain for extended periods of time. One reason for him to go to Canada were political difficulties and, in this context, obstacles in his career in the McCarthy era (among other things, his hopes of becoming a teaching fellow at Harvard were dashed). During World War II he helped organize strikes by the American Union, including at General Electric and General Motors , and he supported progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 presidential election . From 1965 he was back in the USA, first at Johns Hopkins University and from 1965 as a professor at the University of Rochester . From 1967 to 1969 he headed the history faculty. In 1982 he became Joseph P. Wilson Professor of History and in 1990 he retired . From 1992 until his death he was a Fellow of the Edgar F. Shannon Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia . He died of complications from heart surgery nine days after his wife.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow, was at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Institute for Advanced Study, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1976 .

In 1947 he married the painter Honoré Desmond Sharrer (1920–2009), with whom he had a son (the journalist Adam Zagorin).

He dealt primarily with British history of the 16th and 17th centuries and the history of political thought during this period. His first book on the development of political thought in the English Revolution emerged from his dissertation. His following book, on the origins of the English Revolution, identified finer class differences in 17th-century England than were commonly encountered by British historians (he also planned a Marxist history of the English Revolution at times after the war, but later turned to Marxist simplifications in the Contrary to historiography). He also looked at the origins of the ideas of religious tolerance in Europe, general European revolutions of the early modern period, and wrote biographies of Francis Bacon and Thucydides as a political thinker, monographs on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton . In The Ways of Lying , he explored the history of the oaths of allegiance required of Catholics and Protestants during the European Wars of Religion and their refusal (which reflected Zagorin's own experience in the McCarthy era).

literature

• Obituary in Washington Post, May 24, 2009

Fonts

• A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1954, 1965
• The Court and the Country: the Beginning of the English Revolution, 1969
• Rebels and rulers 1500–1660, 2 volumes, Cambridge UP 1982
  • Volume 1: Society, States, and Early Modern Revolution: Agrarian and Urban Rebellions, Volume 2: Provincial rebellion: Revolutionary Civil Wars, 1560-1660
• How the Idea of ​​Religious Toleration Came to the West, Princeton UP 2003
• The English Revolution: politics, events, ideas 1998 (collection of articles)
• Ways of lying: dissimulation, persecution, and conformity in early modern Europe, Harvard UP 1990.
• Milton, aristocrat & rebel: the poet and his politics, 1992
• Francis Bacon, Princeton UP 1999
• Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader, Princeton UP 2005
• Hobbes and the law of nature, Princeton UP 2009

Web links

• Obituary in Telegraph , June 9, 2009
• Oral History Interview , Smithsonian 2007

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In Memoriam: Perez Zagorin. In: virginia.edu. University of Virginia , July 22, 2009, accessed December 6, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter Z. (PDF; 117 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved December 6, 2019 . 
3. ↑ Obituary in Telegraph 2009. What is meant, among other things, is a criticism of the Marxist historian Christopher Hill .
4. ^ Obituary in Telegraph, June 9, 2009