biography
| name: |
Beard, Charles A(ustin)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1874–1948)
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| biography:
| Historian, born in Knightstown, Indiana, USA. Coming from an independent Quaker background, he edited a local newspaper before going on to DePauw University, where he was exposed to the progressive thinkers and social reformers of his time. After graduating (1898), he went on to Oxford University, England, and with money supplied by a Kansas socialist, Mrs Walter Vrooman, helped found Ruskin Hall, a college for workers. After marrying Mary Ritter (1900), he brought her back to Ruskin Hall and continued developing his ideas on improving society, as expressed in his first book, The Industrial Revolution (1901). In 1902 he went to Columbia University to study, joined the faculty (1904–17), and became one of the leaders in adopting the ‘new history’, a progressive approach to using the past to advance the present. His seminal work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), was highly controversial in its day, arguing that America's ‘founding fathers’ had acted more on economic motives than abstract ideals. In 1917 he resigned from Columbia to protest against the treatment of those opposed to America's involvement in World War 1, and from then on never held a regular academic appointment. He lived on his writings, investments, and on the income from a dairy farm in Connecticut, but he remained a prominent public figure as a writer and activist, working for reforms in public administration, speaking out on current affairs, and constantly refining his views about the past. He collaborated with his wife on several major books, starting with The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which emphasized economic forces on American history. In the 1930s he somewhat conditionally endorsed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal domestic policies, but he definitely rejected Roosevelt's foreign policies and sided with the isolationists, even charging Roosevelt with having manoeuvered Japan into attacking the USA. In his final years he modified his earlier views on the influence of economics on history, and lost some of his standing, but he remains one of the noted American historians. |
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