|
Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – March 2, 1998 in Amherst, Massachusetts) was an American historian who helped define Modern liberalism in the United States for two generations through his 40 books and 700 essays and reviews.〔Neil Jumonville, ''Henry Steele Commager: midcentury liberalism and the history of the present'' (1999)〕 His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history ''The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s'' (1950), which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s, and his intellectual history ''Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment'' (1977). In addition, he edited one of the most widely used compilations, ''Documents of American History'', which went through 10 editions between 1938 and 1988 (the tenth, and last, coedited with Commager's former student Milton Cantor.) Commager was one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time. In the 1940s and 1950s he was noted for his campaigns against McCarthyism and other abuses of government power. With his Columbia University colleague Allan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support for Adlai E. Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, and John F. Kennedy in 1960. He opposed the Vietnam War and was an articulate and energetic critic of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, and what he viewed as their abuses of presidential power. ==Background== Commager was born in Pittsburgh as the son of James Williams and Anne Elizabeth (Dan) Commager. He grew up in Toledo and Chicago, attending the University of Chicago and earning degrees in history: Ph.B. (1923), A.M.(1924), and Ph.D.(1928). He lived in Copenhagen for a year in 1924, researching his dissertation on Johann Friedrich Struensee and the Enlightenment reform movement in Denmark. Commager married Evan Alexa Carroll (b. February 4, 1904; d. March 28, 1968) of Bennettsville, South Carolina on July 3, 1928. The couple had three children, Henry Steele Commager Jr. (1932-1984), known as Steele Commager, who became an eminent classicist at Columbia University and wrote the leading book on the Roman poet Horace; Elizabeth Carroll Commager; and Nellie Thomas McColl Commager (now Nell Lasch, wife of the historian Christopher Lasch). Evan Commager wrote several books, including ''Cousins'', ''Tenth Birthday'', ''Beaux'' and ''Valentine.'' On July 14, 1979 Commager married the former Mary Powlesland, a professor in Latin American studies, in Linton, England. Commager died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-five in 1998. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Henry Steele Commager」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|