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Oscar Handlin (September 29, 1915– September 20, 2011)〔(www.encyclopedia.com )〕 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).〔http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/History〕〔 〕 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.〔"Oscar Handlin, Historian Who Chronicled U.S. Immigration, Dies at 95," New York Times, 9/23/2011〕 ==Biography== Handlin was born in Brooklyn, New York, 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).〔(www.boston.com obituaries Sept. 22, 2011 )〕 Between 1936 and 1938 Handlin taught history at Brooklyn College before reentering Harvard University. According to Handlin, it was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. who “directed my attention to the subjects of social history that have since occupied much of my attention’’, urging Handlin to write his dissertation on immigration to Boston in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1940 he received his PhD, joining the faculty in 1939 and remaining until 1986, his work centering around the topic of immigrants in the U.S. and their influence on culture. During his time as a graduate student at Harvard, Handlin was denied the position of vice president in the Henry Adams Club for being Jewish. He was among the first Jewish scholars appointed to a full professorship at Harvard. A man of few words outside the lecture room, Handlin made every word count. He was possessed of a sardonic wit honed by his love of the novels of James Branch Cabell, the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, and the cartoons of Al Capp, who was a family friend.〔Personal conversations with Sarah Handlin Milner, Oscar's sister.〕 He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite being a staunch anti-Communist and Vietnam War hawk, he was honored by both leftist and rightist academics.〔(http://s-usih.org/2011/09/oscar-handlin-1915-2011-and-emergent.html )〕 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「Oscar Handlin」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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