Merle Curti Research Articles

"As characteristic an institution in America as the church was three hundred years ago": New Perspectives on Higher Education's Past and Present

"As characteristic an institution in America as the church was three hundred years ago":New Perspectives on Higher Education's Past and Present Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (bio) Adam Harris, The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right. New York: Harper Collins, 2021. 272 pp. Notes and index. $27.99. William A. Link, Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. vii + 384 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021. 272 pp. Notes and index. $28.00. "In our present age of enormous emphasis on skill," historian Laurence Veysey noted in his still-celebrated Emergence of the American University (1965), "the university may soon become as characteristic an institution as the church was three hundred years ago." His prediction was well timed. In the wake of the Second World War, there was a rapid expansion of campuses across the country, Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the landmark 1965 Higher Education Act into law in November that same year, Federal spending jumped from $1.4 to $3.7 billion between 1963 and 1966, and University of California (UC) President Clark Kerr had already built a national reputation proclaiming there to be many uses for modern American "multiversities," like those atop the Golden State's three-tiered system of public higher education.1 Decades after Governor Ronald Reagan infamously pushed UC Regents to fire Kerr in 1967, historians and journalists have become far more attuned to the many ways campuses have been interwoven into modern American life. There have, of course, been piles of books written about the academy in general, about specific campuses, and about important educational policies, like the 1958 National Defense Education Act.2 University presses have published official histories, which have included both detailed accounts of campus [End Page 324] growth3 and others designed to decorate coffee tables.4 Leading academics and university presidents, like Berkeley's Robert Oppenheimer and University of Chicago's Robert Hutchins, have also been the subject of major biographies written by historians and journalists alike.5 Students have been the subject of many pioneering histories of McCarthyism and the American Left as well as of the Civil Rights struggles that forced campuses finally to admit co-eds and students of color.6 "Prolific" also best describes the work of emeritus Pennsylvania State University historian Roger Geiger, whose tomes became far less celebratory of American higher education's meteoric twentieth-century growth as campuses increasingly sought to profit off of patents at the turn of the millennium.7 Critical assessments of the Ivory Tower have become far more common in recent decades. There were, of course, historians even better known than Veysey for highlighting the gilded nature of the academy's storied growth, including Merle Curti, Roderick Nash, Daniel Noble, and David Levine. Reevaluating the academy's past took on a new urgency at the millennium's turn.8 There was growing concern, even before the Great Recession, about government disinvestment in higher education, which made campuses, including state schools, more dependent on private donations and student fees. A lot of that work decrying the neoliberalization of campuses looked back on the mid-1960s, when Veysey and Kerr published their foundational works, as a golden age when tuition was much cheaper and more faculty had tenure.9 Such celebratory accounts were at odds with how campuses were portrayed in a lot of the post-1990s reassessments of recent American history. Historians noted that universities played a part in increasing inner-city poverty in African American neighborhoods as well as in the growth of research parks in wealthy white suburbs, which hinted at how important campuses had become even before Veysey's and Kerr's bold mid-1960s prognostications.10 More recent scholarship highlights that campuses' longstanding power can no longer be ignored. A lot of this post-2010 work has coincided with stepped-up efforts to unionize the students, instructors, and staff laboring to keep colleges running.11 This research has built on...

Author's Response

Author's Response

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn Ryan C. McIlhenny (bio) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 222 pp. Notes and index. $18.95. It seems that no other branch of historical study is as buoyant as intellectual history. There have been dips in terms of its popularity, especially in relation to what may be the sexier developments within cultural studies, but intellectual history consistently reappears to provide critical assessment not only of historical changes but also changes in the methods of historical research. In the generation after Merle Curti, Perry Miller, or Henry Commager, intellectual history went through a revival in the late 1970s, due in no insignificant way to the Wingspread Conference of 1977, a gathering of historians including Paul Conkin, John Higham, Gordon Wood, David Hollinger, Dorothy Ross, Henry May, and Thomas Bender. Wingspread played an important role in joining older approaches to intellectual history with new creative discoveries within the humanities, breathing new life into this mode of historical writing. Distinct from the history of ideas and the history of philosophy, intellectual historians, according to Peter Gordon, see ideas as “historically conditioned” and thereby “best understood within some larger context, whether it be the context of social struggle and institutional change, intellectual biography (individual or collective), or some larger context of cultural or linguistic dispositions (now often called ‘discourses’).”1 Aware of the historical conditions from which ideas emerge—not to mention, as Daniel Wickberg does in American Labyrinth (2018), the contingency of contexts—intellectual historians are also cognizant of how such contingencies shape the way that they understand the methods of their own craft. Disciplines across the intellectual spectrum have been influenced by developments in cultural studies. Scholars—not just those in the humanities or social sciences, but also in the hard sciences—have demonstrated greater historical awareness, becoming increasingly wary of presenting ideas as normative or static. Social history steeped in the turbid currents of the 1960s, emphasizing long-ignored marginalized groups, was followed almost immediately by cultural history, which considered at a deeper philosophical level the social identities created through textual discourse. The [End Page 165] attendees at Wingspread, as well as those who helped author the collection of essays in New Directions in Intellectual History (1979), engaged the messiness of ideas, especially those articulated by iconoclastic intellectuals like Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. The cultural presupposes the social and thus edges ever closer to the philosophical. Cultural historians are often reluctant to attribute causation to ideas, but Ratner-Rosenhagen and others would argue that causation can be the result of ideas, including cultural ones related to identity. Consequently, the cultural, especially in regard to ideas, has provided fodder for intellectual historians, since both are “invested in decoding meaning,” write Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman in American Labyrinth (2018), and thus “interested in language as a historical source.”2 For James Livingston, cultural change “is the groundwork of intellectual innovation.”3 Benjamin Alpers likewise suggests that cultural history has had an important impact on “intellectual historical practice” and that cultural and intellectual history should be viewed “as a single subfield.”4 Since the 1980s, cultural history has emphasized the pluralistic and unintended happenings from below and from the periphery, challenging first-principles foundationalism, eschewing any form of unidirectional history—whether top-down, bottom-up, or side-to-side (core-periphery)—and welcoming the ongoing creations of and negotiations within these spaces. The revolt of cultural scholars against simplistic bifurcations has led to an acceptance of ideas as contingent, inherently unstable, yet rich with possibilities, revitalizing in turn a dialectical method without a rigid teleology. Since Wingspread, contemporary intellectual historians have come to appreciate such dynamism, expanding interpretive boundaries and injecting the field with new and relevant insights. Following the success of American Nietzsche (2011), Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America embraces the creative possibilities of intellectual history, making the multiple worlds of ideas more palatable for readers. Daniel Rodgers, a leading figure among contemporary intellectual historians, identifies movement “as a central motif in intellectual history,” comparing it to a kind of “borderlands history.”5 Ratner-Rosenhagen agrees...

GEORGE CHAUNCEY'SGAY NEW YORK:A VIEW FROM 25 YEARS LATER

When George Chauncey'sGay New Yorkappeared a quarter century ago, it did so with deserved fanfare. Reviewers celebrated it as “brilliant,” “magisterial,” “exceptional,” “monumental,” “light-years ahead,” “masterful,” “seminal,” “groundbreaking,” “absolutely marvelous,” a “new beginning,” and a “landmark study.” While reviews ofGay New Yorkappeared in the usual American history journals, many of these were uncommonly long, indicating the book's immediate importance. This importance was also felt beyond the discipline of history with reviews appearing in sociological, anthropological, environmental, American Studies, and even speech journals. The Association of American Geographers held a roundtable onGay New Yorkin 1995 in which a participant dubbed it, “one of the more important texts written by a nongeographer to be included in a canon of new social geography.” Beyond the academy, the popular press also expressed considerable interest in the book, with theNew York Times, theNew Yorker, theNew Republic, and theGay Community Newseach taking up the matter ofGay New Yorkin its pages. And beyond the bounds of the United States, scholarly publications in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom also commissioned reviews ofGay New York. A year after its American debut with Basic Books, the parent firm of HarperCollins released it in the United Kingdom, and then eight years later the noted historian Didier Eribon translated it into French for the Parisian publisher Fayard. Within its first few years of publication,Gay New Yorkalso collected a number of notable prizes, including theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize for history, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Lambda Literary Award for gay men's studies, and the Merle Curti Award from the OAH.

The Promise of the 1821 Revolution and the Suffering Body. Some thoughts on Modernisation and Anti-intellectualism

How can we understand and interpret the popular narrative of the 1821 revolution that speaks for the suffering body of the fighter while it reproaches the "Frenchified heterochthons" and conveys a kind of anti intellectualism (defined broadly and loosely by Merle Curti as "a suspicion of, opposition to, or derogation of intellectuals")? The popular view of 1821 has its origins in the memoirs of the "freedom fighters" written after the War of Independence. Its main motifs travelled from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century and lent themselves to multiple readings and various ideological uses. Although it has a socio political content, it cannot be explained in terms of a grand narrative of class war, as some Marxist historians of the twentieth century argue; neither can it be understood in terms of the grand narrative of Greek modernisation, that is, as a survival from a previous stage of historical development, a relic from the past, even though it draws its motives from traditional sources and idealises the role of chieftains in the War of Independence. I suggest that we approach the anti-intellectualism of the early nineteenth century from an anti-essentialist perspective of Greek history that highlights the Janus-face of modernisation and the ambivalent nature of modern ideologies (especially of popular nationalism) with regard to the relation between the intellectual and the people or the nation.

Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding (review)

Reviewed by: Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding Eric Hinderaker (bio) Keywords American Revolution, Revolutionary War, Founding Fathers Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding. By Alfred F. Young and Gregory H. Nobles. (New York: New York University Press, 2011. Pp. 286. Cloth, $79.00; paper, $26.00.) This book consists of two long essays. The first, by Alfred F. Young, was originally published in 1995 and assesses the historiography of the American Revolution, especially in the half-century following the end of World War II.1 The second, by Gregory H. Nobles, focuses on the last two decades and explores the ways in which Revolutionary scholarship has expanded and shifted in that time. The result is a useful survey of an enormous body of work, and at the same time a telling recapitulation of the field’s evolution and fragmentation. Young begins with a discussion of J. Franklin Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, NJ, 1926) to consider how scholars came gradually to ask whether, and to what extent, the American Revolution caused a transformation in the social order. He then traces the evolution of the field, dividing scholars into interpretive camps defined by their dominant political ideologies. Though Jameson’s book was more suggestive essay than fully fleshed monograph, Young argues that it helped to shift scholarly attention from the origins [End Page 499] of the Revolution to its outcomes, and from elites to ordinary people. In Jameson’s wake, the Progressive historians kept his emphases alive. Young calls particular attention to the work of Curtis P. Nettels, Merle Curti, and Merrill Jensen, and also notes the importance of Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin as training grounds for graduate students. From the 1930s to the 1970s, dozens of scholars probed and modified Progressive assumptions, and we can see patterns of evolution and variation in their thought. Jensen, for example, argued for an “internal revolution” (41) but thought its achievements were compromised in the political sphere, while his student Jackson Turner Main contended that the social effects of the Revolution were modest, but political democratization was substantial. Young argues that the era of the Cold War gave rise to a generation of “Counter-Progressives” (47) who were intent on downplaying social conflict and rejecting both Marxism and relativism. Scholars like Daniel J. Boorstin, Louis B. Hartz, and Robert E. Brown contended that the colonies were free and democratic to begin with, so they viewed the Revolution as little more than “a mopping up operation,” as Hartz put it(52), which enshrined in principle the conditions that already existed in fact. Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan’s book on the Stamp Act crisis, which appeared in 1953, offered a “peculiar blend, rescuing whig thought from the economic interpretation of the Progressives while embracing the imperial school’s sympathies with suffering loyalist gentlemen and a distaste among conservatives and liberals for the mob” (56). Even when Morgan argued, more than twenty years later, that the simultaneous rise of slavery and freedom was the “‘central paradox’ “ (57) of American history, he held to the view that the Revolution was largely consensual, since the institution of slavery kept this potentially radical lower class unarmed, disenfranchised, and politically inert. Young characterizes the 1960s and 1970s as an era when the rise of New Left and New Social history contended with a second wave of Counter-Progressivism for historiographical dominance. He touches on Staughton Lynd and Jesse Lemish, two scholars whose political radicalism shaped their scholarship and impacted their career trajectories. Both challenged conventional Progressivism as they sought to reconceptualize history “from the bottom up.” Young also addresses the work of many other historians who detailed “the contours of the small community” and “class stratification in the large seaboard cities” (90). Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood are the only two historians Young identifies as Counter-Progressives [End Page 500] in this era, and his treatment of them is ambivalent enough to call into doubt the appropriateness of the category. In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967), Bailyn argued unequivocally that Revolutionary ideas were inherently radical and had enduring...

Strangers in the Land, Gender, and Immigration Policy

I first read John Higham's book in an immigration history seminar in my first semester of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. In fact, Higham visited campus that fall to present the Merle Curti lecture, named for his mentor. Higham's influence has remained significant: like many historians of immigration and ethnicity, I have often returned to his book during the course of my own teaching and research, whether on American Catholic history or U.S. immigration policy. My remarks focus on gender issues and immigration policy history inStrangers in the Land.

Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (review)

Reviewed by: Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? Paul S. Boyer, Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? by Stephen Sizer. Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005. 298 pp. $29.00. No one who follows events in the Middle East can fail to be aware of the involvement of so-called Christian Zionists in the politics of the region. These are evangelical Protestants whose reading of Bible prophecy convinces them that God has a distinct end-time plan for the Jews—a plan whose fulfillment [End Page 160] is integral to Christ's second coming and thousand-year Millennial reign. According to this interpretive system, known as premillennial dispensationalism, as the End approaches, Israel will expand to incorporate the lands God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their seed, from the Euphrates to "the river of Egypt." The Jews will also take over Jerusalem's Temple Mount and rebuild the Temple on the site now occupied by two sacred Islamic shrines. Stephen Sizer, an evangelical Anglican clergyman, offers a history and critique of this version of Christian Zionism. His book may seem heavy going in places for readers not immersed in this belief system, but it does illuminate prophetic beliefs that shape the attitudes of millions of evangelical Protestants worldwide, and especially in the United States, toward Israel, the Palestinians, and Islam. (These End-Time beliefs also influence believers' view of the United Nations, the global economy, and U.S. mass culture—but that is another story.) Sizer begins by tracing the British origins of dispensationalism and its Zionist component. This belief system is usually credited to John Darby, a founder of the Plymouth Brethren, an English dissenting sect. Sizer, however, stresses the role of such now-obscure figures as Edward Irving, a Scottish preacher popular in London in the 1820s, and Henry Drummond, a banker and politician with an interest in Bible prophecy. He traces the influence of these beliefs on later British leaders, including David Lloyd George, the prime minister who oversaw the issuance of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, calling for "a National Home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Readers interested in the evolution of American attitudes toward Israel will welcome Sizer's discussion of dispensationalism's migration to the United States through John Darby's evangelistic tours and the preaching and writings of James H. Brookes, Arno C. Gaebelein, Cyrus Scofield, and other late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century figures. Sizer notes the importance of the wealthy Chicago real-estate developer William Blackstone, a committed dispensationalist and early Zionist. Visiting Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine in 1888–89, Blackstone saw them as exciting portents of Christ's imminent return. In 1891, five years before Theodor Herzl's Zionist manifesto Der Judenstaat, Blackstone drafted a "Memorial" calling for a Jewish state in Palestine, "according to God's distribution of nations," as a response to Czarist pogroms. He secured signatures from J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Chief Justice of the United States, and some 400 other government and business leaders. With reason, Louis D. Brandeis later praised Blackstone as "the Father of Zionism." Sizer's chapter on dispensationalism's political implications is particularly timely. Popular writers and televangelists like Hal Lindsey, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, and James Hagee, together with politicians [End Page 161] who share their beliefs (or seek the votes of those who do), have been outspoken supporters of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, as a step toward the prophesied expansion to the biblical boundaries, and of all Jerusalem and Temple Mount—essential to the rebuilding of the Temple. These Christian Zionists reject Palestinian political or territorial claims; denigrate the Palestinian people in language that Sizer finds disturbingly analogous to Nazi stereotypes of the Jews; and, in their prophecy-fueled worldview, demonize Islam as vile and sinister. Such figures, reinforced by a network of like-minded organizations, writes Sizer, constitute "probably the most powerful lobby in the United States today, influencing not only American foreign policy but also the chances of a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict" (p. 105). Sizer only passingly mentions the darker side of the dispensationalist version...

"Our Original Barbarism": Man vs. Nature in Thomas Jefferson's Moral Experience

Jefferson, perhaps more than any other early democratic theorist, recognized that the development of social institutions and government could not be left to chance or to the Laws of Nature.1One of the most fundamental fact about Thomas Jefferson-maybe the fundamental fact about Thomas Jefferson-is that he was a white man, and a landholding white man at that. Scholars of ethnicity in the last thirty years have spent an enormous amount of time analyzing what it has meant to be Indian, or African American, or Mexican American, or Asian American, but scholars of mainstream history have spent almost no time analyzing what it means to be white; whiteness, on the contrary, simply remains the norm by which the difference of the non whites is gauged. We are just beginning our exploration of whiteness, as a culturally and politically constructed phenomenon.2This paper presents Thomas moral attitudes from a particular point of view.3 The thesis I defend can be stated in a very schematic way. (1) In order to secure the new-born Republic the American leader, according to Jefferson, must struggle against enemies, against circumstances but mainly against nature. Nature is perhaps the most powerful symbol of the disorder white Americans have to conquer. (2) This struggle against reveals a deep ethical commitment. White men are praiseworthy to the extent that they keep fighting against disorder, nature, and circumstances. (3) optimism, or better, meliorism, was aimed at promoting moral behavior, i.e., to incite his alter egos to struggle against adverse conditions. As to whether or not he was confident about the course of American history, I have staked no claims in this paper.4 (4) case for the struggle against is ethically coherent and leads to some interesting reflections on ideas about and white Americans in particular.The notion of human nature in this paper refers to white Americans, namely, to the moral character, temperament, and ambitions of those leaders whose main burden, in opinion, should be to construct nineteenthcentury America. This examination takes for granted that Jefferson neither worked out a systematic theory of nor elaborated a specific theory of the essence of white Americans.5 Nevertheless, it is too much to say that Jefferson did not work out his ideas in a logical way.6 His anthropological views were fairly coherent even though very difficult to disentangle. Jefferson, for instance, was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Furthermore, he was not satisfied with a philosophical, simply general, and a priori definition of a universal nature. Jefferson placed beings outside a metaphysical frame of reference. He placed them within the sphere of nature, and in so doing [he] was a true exponent of the Enlightenment.7 Humans are merged into geographical, social, religious, economic, in short positive contexts and conditions. They appear as conditioned beings. On the other hand Jefferson was not exclusively involved in the examination of a physical or a posteriori anthropology in which humans are considered solely in the unique particularity of their races and habits.8Thomas Jefferson stood in the middle between the quest for a philosophical theory of and a scientific examination of it. One thing is clear: he was not content with sweeping statements. Merle Curti noted, for example, Jefferson's feelings about nature's plasticity.9 This sense of plasticity suggests realism and complexity of vision. A philosopher and an anthropologist, Jefferson was neither satisfied by a general definition nor by an optimistic portrait of nature. He was against idealization, in particular when white Americans are at stake. Thus, this paper considers the terms in which Jefferson questioned the cheery view of that some enlightened thinkers celebrated. …

Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century

Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in Twentieth Century Warren I. Susman. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. Warren Susman is pioneer and bridgebuilder. Trained as historian, he took up cause of American and served both areas well. He even began to explore popular culture, although he never joined the movement. This book shows how an original thinker can come up with startling new ideas and connections. It is partly autobiographical, because the writing of history is as personal an act as writing fiction. When he began his own in 1930s, his mentor Merle Curti praised him for undertaking what Susman called a serious intellectual struggle with my father. Susman replied to his mentor, was stunned at your suggestion, supposing my undertaking was an act of disinterested scholarship. works of history are autobiographical, that does not mean that is all they are. Certainly not in his case. Susman praises Dr. Curti for discussing dime novels and for his use of many off-beat sources. That is exactly what Susman does, coming to see America through notion of of abundance and of paradox. We live, he says, in hieroglyphic civilization in which images always supplement ideas. His photographs are one of highlights of book. He centers them on critical themes: Our Father, Our Skyscraper, Our Daily Bread, Our Flag, Our Town, and Our Church. In our world of images-turned-icons, we can literally see fundamental tensions that define hieroglyphic civilization that we have created. Another distinctive feature of America: no previous culture has been so shaped by communication technology or has spent so much of its energy and resources analyzing communication and its problems. He hits home; I spent years in communications studies niches. Like Susman, I ended up wondering whether anyone could really communicate at all. (What we have here is problem of communication.) Of course, we have had few great communicators: Jefferson, Calhoun, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Susman always pops up with surprise. He respects President Roosevelt's cultural role without limit, but adds, If we want to know how people experienced world in 1930s, I argue that Mickey Mouse may be more important than President Roosevelt in that understanding (103). All ages demand symbols that sometimes conflict. In 1940s, for example, we suffered pain and anguish of Okies of Dust Bowl-and were singing Oh! What Beautiful Morning! in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943). Conflicting symbols. Or again: we painstakingly reconstructed colonial Williamsburg as hedge against rising techno-industrial order. …

Pragmatism and the Practice of History: From Turner and Du Bois to Today

Abstract:Pragmatism has affected American historical writing since the early twentieth century. Such contemporaries and students of Peirce, James, and Dewey as Frederick Jackson Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, Mary Beard, and Carl Becker drew on pragmatism when they fashioned what was called the “new history.” They wanted to topple inherited assumptions about the past and replace positivist historical methods with the pragmatists' model of a community of inquiry. Such widely read mid‐twentieth‐century historians as Merle Curti, Henry Steele Commager, and Richard Hofstadter embraced the perspectivalism, fallibilism, and instrumentalism of the pragmatists, thereby helping to sustain the tradition during its nadir in American philosophy departments. Many historians have been drawn to the study of pragmatism during its recent renaissance; others have advanced pragmatist‐inspired philosophies of history. Through such prominent contemporary historians as Thomas Haskell, David Hollinger, and Joyce Appleby, the ideas of Pierce, James, and Dewey continue to influence the historical profession.

The Power of History: The Weakness of a Profession

Winston Churchill and George Burns, among others, are reputed to have said, “If I had known that I would live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” My revision of that sentiment is simple: “If I had had any idea that I would ever be considered for the presidency of the Organization of American Historians, I would have worked harder to deserve the honor.” The first meeting of this group I ever attended was in Kansas City in 1965, the place and the moment when the old Mississippi Valley Historical Association voted to become the Organization of American Historians (OAH). That name change simply ratified the fact that the Mississippi Valley Historical Association had become the most important professional society in the nation for persons interested in the history of the United States. Indeed, the long list of OAH presidents over the years is a virtual roll call of the great historians of the twentieth century—James G. Randall, Merle Curti, Walter Prescott Webb, Avery Craven, Thomas C. Cochran, C. Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, William E. Leuchtenburg, Joyce Appleby, David Brion Davis, and Eric Foner among them. I am humbled to be associated with them in any way. The 1965 OAH convention also has personal significance because it led directly to the birth of my son Kevan nine months later.

Merle Curti and the Significance of Peace Research in American History

This article investigates Curti's long and distinguished professional interest in peace history. Relying on Lawrence Wittner's research note, “Merle Curti and the Development of Peace History,” which appeared in the January 1998 issue of Peace & Change, the author expands the discussion with extensive use of Curti's unpublished correspondence. The author critically analyzes Curti's publications in the field in the 1930s, his support for World War II, and his encouragement to younger scholars to continue researching and publishing in peace history as a means of advancing human civilization.

Correction: Making Nations/Making States

Ian Tyrrell, author of the article “Making Nations/Making States” in the December 1999 issue of the JAH, writes: I may have inadvertently misled readers by stating that Arthur Schlesinger Sr. was a “student” of Frederick Jackson Turner's. I bracketed him incorrectly with someone who was indeed a former student of Turner's, Merle Curti; Schlesinger and Curti were, Ray Allen Billington pointed out, Turner's “ardent admirers,” but I have elided their relationship. Schlesinger was attracted to Harvard as a professor at Turner's urging, according to Billington, who also pointed out that Schlesinger took up Turner's interest in social history and that Turner himself had started an essay on “The Significance of the City in American History,” a subject that was to be part of Schlesinger's important work. I apologize for this slip.

Reply to Hall

I am very grateful to Peter Hall for his characteristically learned and helpful contribution. I confess that I was appalled when I first started to read it, because no decent person likes to be exposed as a megalomaniac. But so be it. My piece was published as a Commentary, and it was intended to be just that—its origin, after all, was an informal speech to a group of philanthropy scholars. It was intended to be a brief, informal, and personal reflection of the attempt to develop a modern field of philanthropic studies, no more. However, I do not disagree at all with the much fuller and broader account that Peter gives. To be fair, the luncheon question that Humphrey Doermann asked me was not whether there was a literature on philanthropy, but whether there was a scholarly literature on philanthropic foundations. I would have given Humphrey a different answer if he had asked Peter’s question. Of course, I am familiar with much, but certainly not all, of the literature that Peter mentions. Having been a colleague of Merle Curti and Bill Taylor’s at Wisconsin (and having worked with their students mentioned by Peter), I was well aware of the Princeton Conference and the Curti project. Peter is, of course, correct when he points out the role of John D. Rockefeller in the creation of Independent Sector. I was thinking of what John Gardner did for and with the organization after Mr. Rockefeller’s death. I am, however, particularly intrigued by Peter’s comment in Note 13 that I was “jockeying for the commission’s research portfolio.” This is news to me, and I am at a loss as to what I was jockeying for. I am also confused by the statement that I was an active member of the Council on Foundation/Foundation Center Joint Committee on Philanthropy. I have no memory of such an organization, although I certainly do remember attending a few meetings in New York with Tony Cline (then president of the Russell Sage Foundation) and a number of other people interested in philanthropic research during what I would have thought to be early in the mid-1970s. Perhaps this group was sponsored by the Council on Foundation and the Foundation Center. I learned a lot at these

The Present-Minded Professor: Merle Curti's Work as an Intellectual Historian

THE FOLLOWING ESSAY is revised from commemoration of Merle (1897-1996) and his impact on the practice of intellectual history held at the 1997 meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in San Francisco. The special session included three other papers given by senior historians who were influenced by Merle Curti, each on different aspect of his scholarship. After these presentations, any number of people from the large audience rose to memorialize Professor Curti. Favorite stories were told and numerous tributes offered, in Richard Kirkendall's words, to his marvelous capacity for friendship. Session Chair Gerda Lerner spoke of how, after meeting in his eightieth year, his continued engagement with life provided her a model for growing old. She ended the commemoration by simply and movingly describing him as thoroughly good man. Taken collectively, the conference papers paid tribute to the great range and diversity of Merle Curti's intelligence and scholarship and impact on his students. Lawrence Wittner, who studied with him as master's degree student at the University of Wisconsin, spoke of his pioneering development of peace history. With his book Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936 (1936) and earlier works, Curti was the most important figure to challenge historical scholarship into the

Land Ownership, Farm Size, and Tenancy after the Civil War

able to improve their relative status.' The competing story tells of a smoothly functioning agricultural ladder. Also constructed from the building blocks of census data, it is likewise consistent with rising tenancy rates and falling farm sizes. Microlevel studies beginning with the work of Merle Curti and Margaret and Allan Bogue and continued by Donald Winters, and Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman, among others, offer close-up views of midwestern land tenure. All indicate that the rising tenancy rate reflected a longer time spent on the lower rungs of the agricultural ladder with younger fanners building the wealth necessary to purchase their own land.2 If this more optimistic interpretation of the census data is correct, then data should show that some tenants eventually improved their relative status. New data show just such an improvement in the relative status of tenants. A case study of a Missouri township reinforces conclusions from these latter papers and other recent and detailed studies of local land markets.3 Even falrmers with little personal wealth and no real property were neither exploited nor left behind during the decades of economic growth in the North following the Civil War.4 The new data link the manuscripts of the decennial censuses of 1860, 1870, and 1880, for Salt River Township in Ralls County, Missouri, with

Merle Curti and the Development of Peace History

Although the late Merle Curti is best known for his contributions to the fields of American intellectual and social history, he was also the leading figure in the development of peace history. Committed to the attainment of world peace, he was the first prominent American historian to orient his scholarship toward this goal and to encourage others to undertake peace research. He and his associates played a key role in the founding of the Conference on Peace Research in History, an organization which he subsequently led and to which he continued to lend his support. In this fashion, Curti became the most important intellectual to mobilize historians for a world without war.

The Troublesome History of Foundations: Correcting a Contentious History

The Troublesome History of Foundations: Correcting a Contentious History Barry D. Karl (bio) Judith Sealander. Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xii + 349 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. In 1957, University of Wisconsin historian Merle Curti chose the pages of the American Historical Review to issue a call to his fellow professionals to pay attention to what he called “The History of American Philanthropy as a Field of Research.” The article was not a voicing of a personal insight for which he claimed sole credit, but the result of a systematic search for a community of professional thought he wanted to generate. Curti’s article was a summary and extension of the Report of the Princeton Conference on the History of Philanthropy, conducted the previous year with the support of the Russell Sage Foundation. F. Emerson Andrews, the Foundation’s internal historian, had been part of a trio of Russell Sage staffers who, a decade earlier, had produced the two-volume history of the foundation’s first forty years. The archive of substantiating documents they left consisted of two four-drawer file cabinets which became all that remained of that foundation’s initial history—cleaned out not necessarily or even intentionally to protect the foundation, but to save expensive Manhattan floor space. Andrews’s own, much more extensive notes, drafts, and comments from readers, as well as similar drafts of his other writings, were moved eventually to the Foundation Center’s warehouse and are now being transferred to the philanthropy archive at the Indianapolis Center on Philanthropy, where scholars will be able to peruse them. Andrews’s love for the history of philanthropy led him to claim the status of professional for himself, hence his support of Curti and his Princeton conference. It did involve his assertion of the foundation as a valid policy instrument in American society, an attitude that helped generate a more critical history from popular writers and critics like Waldemar Nielsen in subsequent decades. If one can determine a beginning point for the professional historian’s concern with foundations and philanthropy, as distinguished from insider memoirs and other justificatory accounts, Curti’s article was it; but one must [End Page 612] look to at least two more decades before Hamlet-like historians picked up the unbaited foil and resumed what has become the duel. The battle was not drawn until the 1970s. The reasons for the pause are many, certainly, and each of us whose work with the subject may be said to have taken off from Curti’s clarion call might give a somewhat different answer: the unwillingness of foundations and philanthropists to surrender their papers for research; the suspicion that the subject was not really as central to historical study as Curti thought it was; a fashion in historical writing that had become enamored of other topics—social history, quantification, and approaches to intellectual history that looked more to literature and artifacts, ideas even less mundane and more abstract than those pursued by the available cash on the philanthropic barrel-head. Foundations are institutions that seem to fit into no available institutional classification without some Procrustean reshaping. That reshaping has led to disagreements among writers about foundations that sometimes get a tad acerbic. The fact that what started as a very civil professional encounter became a duel has other, related sources, chiefly that Andrews’s work represented a very supportive view of foundations and philanthropy that scholarly historians found wanting. Since then there have also been more specific ideological disputes that take place in a Gramscian Marxist mode. The literature has been polarized almost from the beginning, and Curti was hoping to find a center position that might provide stability and light rather than rancor. One could certainly justify Judith Sealander’s lack of recognition of the Curti conference and report on the grounds not only that Curti’s noble attempt at professional manners failed, but also that she is dealing with a period of history that begins with the Progressive Era and ends with the Hoover administration (not really...

In Retrospect: George Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup and the Dialectic of Marxian Slave Studies

George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup and the Dialectic of Marxian Slave Studies Alex Lichtenstein (bio) In 1964, on leave from Wayne State University’s Monteith College, George Rawick traveled to London to acquaint himself with the West Indian Marxist and author of The Black Jacobins (1938), C. L. R. James. At the time, James was the mentor-in-exile for a small nucleus of Detroit ex-Trotskyites who called themselves the “Facing Reality” committee. Rawick, having gravitated toward this sect when he moved to the Motor City, sought out the man who remained its theoretical and political inspiration a decade after his deportation from the United States. In London, James asked Rawick to give an impromptu lecture on American history to a small audience in his living room. When Rawick finished speaking, James simply asked “What do you know about the slaves’ reaction to slavery.” “Not a hell of a lot,” Rawick admitted, feebly citing Benjamin Botkin’s collection of Federal Writers Project (FWP) interviews done with ex-slaves during the late 1930s, Lay My Burden Down (1945). “Why don’t you look at those,” James suggested. 1 Out of this encounter grew Rawick’s monumental documentary project, for which he is justly celebrated, the forty-one-volume The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (1972–1979, published in three installments), which eventually made all the FWP interviews with former slaves readily available to scholars and students. The historical profession’s belated willingness to take the testimony of former slaves as seriously as the documentary record left by the slaveholders helped revolutionize the study of slavery during the 1970s. Both the great insights afforded by the interviews themselves, as well as their well-documented flaws, are worthy of a separate essay and will not receive consideration here. Instead, I want to direct attention to the significance of Rawick’s own neglected monographic contribution to the historiographic transformations in the study of race and slavery, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, which appeared as volume 1 of The American Slave in 1972. 2 Intended both as “a substantive essay on slavery” (p. 163) and an introductory companion to the published FWP interviews, From Sundown to [End Page 712] Sunup sketched in eight brief chapters a sweeping history of American slavery and racism. In Part 1 of the book, “The Sociology of Slavery in the United States,” Rawick focused on the African background of the slaves, slave religion, the slave family, the treatment of slaves by their masters, and slave resistance. In a very brief second part of the book, “The Sociology of European and American Racism,” he shifted somewhat incongruously to a complex discussion of the historical relationship between slavery and racism in the New World. For a number of reasons, professional historians dismissed or ignored Rawick’s book even while they applauded the publication of the FWP material. Although he had a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin, where he had worked with Merle Curti, Rawick remained on the margins of the historical profession, in part because of his commitment to radical politics. He tended to publish in sectarian journals and pamphlets of the Left; he deliberately taught at places like Wayne State University’s Monteith College and New York’s Empire State College, where he could focus on workers’ education and engage working-class students; and his interest in sociology, dating back to his work with Hans Gerth at Madison, led him to take a job in Washington University’s sociology department (which he later resigned in protest). 3 Indeed, in his review of The American Slave in the American Historical Review, distinguished southern historian C. Vann Woodward mistook Rawick for a sociologist (a confusion engendered, in part, by Rawick’s substitution of the term “sociology” for “history” in the book). Furthermore, while Rawick was a historian, his 1957 dissertation (never published) had been on the experiences of young people during the New Deal in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and the American Youth Congress. As a historian of slavery he was essentially an autodidact, which perhaps explains why some reviewers found his book unoriginal. Finally, published rather...