Oscar Handlin

Oscar Handlin (September 29, 1915– September 20, 2011) was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration history in the 1950s. Handlin won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Uprooted (1951). Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was said to "have played an important role" in passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the discriminatory immigration quota system in the U.S.

Handlin was born in Brooklyn, New York on Sept. 29, 1915, the eldest of three children of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His mother, the former Ida Yanowitz came to the United States in 1904 and worked in the garment industry. His father Joseph immigrated in 1913 after attending a commercial college in the Ukraine and being stationed in Harbin, China as a soldier during the Russo-Japanese War. Handlin's parents were passionately devoted to literature and the life of the mind. Their experience of religious persecution in Czarist Russia made them fiercely devoted to democracy and social justice (Handlin was a proto-"red diaper baby.") The couple owned a grocery store, the success of which along with real estate investments enabled them to send their children Oscar, Nathan, and Sarah to Harvard.

Known for his prodigious memory that allowed him to attend classes without taking notes, in 1930 Handlin entered Brooklyn College at age 15, graduating in 1934, then earning a M.A. from Harvard University in 1935, after which he won a Frederick Sheldon Fellowship for research in Europe. "I don't know why, Dr. Handlin joked in a 1952 Boston Globe interview. "I guess they just liked my face. Traveling in England, Ireland, Italy, and France, he began assembling material that would become his first book Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1865 (1941).

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