biography
| name: |
Commager, Henry Steele
|
pronunciation:
[komajer]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1902–98)
|
| biography:
| Historian, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He studied at the University of Chicago (1928 PhD) and the universities of Copenhagen, Cambridge, and Oxford. He taught at New York University (1926–38), Columbia University (1939–56), and Amherst College (1956). His best-known book, The Growth of the American Republic (1931), co-written with Samuel Eliot Morison, remains a standard undergraduate text. Documents of American History (1934) marked the start of the editing and publishing of anthologies of source materials of the American historical record, for which Commager was a pioneer. He became a strong critic of 1950s anti-Communist conformity, writing in Civil Liberties under Attack (1951), ‘The great danger that threatens us is neither heterodox nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought’. He continued to argue for free speech and enquiry during the Vietnam era, asserting that the idealism of the 1960s was a renaissance, not a repudiation, of American Revolutionary ideals. Unlike many of his professional colleagues, he also wrote for more popular media and often spoke out on contemporary issues. He was noted for a lucid style that combined a keen critical viewpoint with an absence of cant and jargon. |
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