Gertrude Himmelfarb
| Gertrude Himmelfarb | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 8, 1922 Brooklyn, New York |
| Nationality | US |
| Citizenship | US |
| Alma mater |
Brooklyn College (BA 1942), University of Chicago (M.A. 1944, PhD 1950) Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1939–42) Girton College (1946–47) |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the British Academy Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of the Royal Historical Society Fellow of the Society of American Historians Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1982–88) Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress (1984–2008) Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson Center (1985–96) Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute (1987–present) Jefferson Lecture (1991) National Humanities Medal (2004) |
| Spouse | Irving Kristol (m. January 18, 1942 – September 18, 2009; his death) |
| Children |
William Kristol Elizabeth Nelson |
| Relatives | parents Max and Bertha (Lerner) Himmelfarb brother Milton Himmelfarb |
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Gertrude Himmelfarb (born August 8, 1922), also known as Bea Kristol, is an American historian. She has been a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She has written extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.
Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Bertha (née Lerner) and Max Himmelfarb, both of Russian Jewish background. She received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1942 and her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. She also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and at Girton College, Cambridge University. In 1942, she married Irving Kristol, known as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, and has two children, Elizabeth Nelson and William Kristol, a political commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard. She has long been involved in Jewish conservative intellectual circles.
Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. She has served on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1991 she delivered the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004 she received the National Humanities Medal awarded by the President.
Himmelfarb has long nurtured the neoconservative movement in American politics and intellectual life; her husband Irving Kristol helped found the movement.
Himmelfarb is a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices. Her book The New History and the Old (published in 1987 and revised and expanded in 2004) is a critique of the varieties of "new history" that have sought to displace the old: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history but relies on partial and dubious data;Marxist historiography derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the actual protagonists and events of history; psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence; analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure;social history, "history from the bottom," that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history); and, most recently, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.
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