Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. | |
---|---|
Born | February 27, 1888 Xenia, Ohio, U.S. |
Died |
October 30, 1965 (aged 77) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Alma mater |
Ohio State University Columbia University |
Occupation | Historian |
Parent(s) | Bernhard Schlesinger Kate Feurle |
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr. (/ˈʃlɛsɪndʒər/; (February 27, 1888 – October 30, 1965) was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causes (such as economic profit and conflict between businessmen and farmers) 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. His son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007), also both taught at Harvard and was a noted historian.
Schlesinger's father, Bernhard Schlesinger, was a Prussian Jew, and his mother, Kate (née Feurle), was an Austrian Catholic. The two joined Protestantism together and emigrated to Xenia, Ohio, in 1872.
Arthur Schlesinger was born in Xenia, Ohio, and graduated from The Ohio State University in 1910. While a student at Ohio State, he was initiated into the Ohio Zeta chapter of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity. He took his Ph.D. in history at Columbia University, where he was influenced by both Herbert L. Osgood and Charles A. Beard. He taught at Ohio State and the University of Iowa before he joined the faculty of Harvard University as a professor of history in 1924, succeeded Frederick Jackson Turner and 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.