This article is about the elder Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888-1965). For his son (1917-2007), see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr..

Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr. (February 27, 1888 – October 30, 1965) was an American historian. His son, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was also a noted historian.

Life and career

Schlesinger's father, Bernhard Schlesinger, was a Prussian Jew, and his mother, Kate (née Feurle), was an Austrian Catholic. The two joined the Protestant church together and emigrated to Xenia, Ohio, in 1872.[1][2]

Arthur M. Schlesinger was born in Xenia, Ohio, and graduated from the Ohio State University in 1910. He took his Ph.D. in history at Columbia University. He taught at Ohio State and the University of Iowa before joining the faculty of Harvard University as a professor of history in 1924. Schlesinger taught at Harvard until 1954. Harvard's Schlesinger Library in women's history is named after him and his wife Elizabeth, a noted feminist. He became an editor of the New England Quarterly in 1928.

Arthur enjoyed strong family ties and commitment. His two sisters Olga and Marion Etna became schoolteachers and made it possible for their three younger brothers (George, Arthur and Hugo) to attend college graduating in engineering history and law. One of his sons was born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger and added "Meier" as his middle name later in life.

Ideas

He pioneered social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causes (like economic profit) and downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors. He was highly influential as a director of PhD dissertations at Harvard for three decades, especially in the fields of social, women's and immigration history.[3] He commented in 1922, "From reading history in textbooks one would think half of our population made only a negligible contribution to history."[4] He promoted social history by co-editing the 13-volume History of American Life series with Dixon Ryan Fox. These thick volumes, written by leading young scholars, avoided politics and constitutional issues, and focus on such topics as housing, fashion, sports, education, and cultural life.[5]

In "Tides of National Politics," a provocative essay in the Yale Review in 1939, he presented his cyclical view of history which identified irregular oscillations between liberal and conservative national moods. This model attracted few historians, apart from his son. Schlesinger introduced the idea of polling historians to rank presidential greatness, which attracted much attention. Schlesinger was co-editor and contributor of the "History of American Life" series (1928–43), which stressed social, demographic and economic trends, and downplayed politics and individuals. Numerous Schlesinger doctoral students, such as Merle Curti, studied the social analysis of ideas and attitudes.

In an essay on "The Significance of Jacksonian Democracy" (in New Viewpoints in American History (1922)) Schlesinger drew attention to the fact that "while democracy was working out its destiny in the forests of the Mississippi Valley, the men left behind in the eastern cities were engaging in a struggle to establish conditions of equality and social well-being adapted to their special circumstances".

As a historian of the rise of the city in American life, he argued that for a full understanding of the Jacksonian democratic movement: "It is necessary to consider the changed circumstances of life of the common man in the new industrial centers of the East since the opening years of the nineteenth century." This was a challenge to the frontier thesis of his Harvard colleague Frederick Jackson Turner. In Schlesinger's essay, the common man of the Mississippi Valley and the common man of eastern industrialism stood uneasily side by side.

He once characterized prejudice against Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people".[6]

Works

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Straddling Worlds by Steven J. Harper, page 99
  2. ^ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/dec/21/the-age-of-schlesinger/
  3. ^ Marion Casey (2006). Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States. NYU Press. p. 7.
  4. ^ Leonard Dinnerstein and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds. (1979). American Vistas: 1607-1877. Oxford U.P. p. 64. ((cite book)): |author= has generic name (help)
  5. ^ Mark C. Carnes (2004). Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other). Simon and Schuster. p. 265.
  6. ^ Brad Roberts (1990). The New Democracies: Global Change and U.S. Policy. MIT Press. p. 35.

References

1884–1900
1901–1925
1926–1950
1951–1975
1976–2000
2001–present

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