By Neil Jumonville
Historian Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) used to be one of many top American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century. writer or editor of greater than 40 books, he taught for many years at long island college, Columbia collage, and Amherst university and used to be a pioneer within the box of yank reviews. yet Commager's paintings was once not at all restrained to the halls of the collage: a favored essayist, lecturer, and political commentator, he earned a name as an activist for liberal factors and waged public campaigns opposed to McCarthyism within the Fifties and the Vietnam conflict within the Sixties. As few were capable of do some time past half-century, Commager united the 2 worlds of scholarship and public highbrow activity.Through Commager's existence and legacy, Neil Jumonville explores a few questions primary to the highbrow historical past of postwar the United States. After contemplating even if Commager and his affiliates have been particularly the conservative and conformist team that critics have assumed them to be, Jumonville bargains a reevaluation of the liberalism of the interval. ultimately, he makes use of Commager's instance to invite even if highbrow existence is actually appropriate with scholarly existence.
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Example text
Some of the European scenery had reminded him of the Adirondacks in New York. ∂∑ In early June 1925, when the ship docked and Commager went by rail on the Empire Express up the Hudson, he was even more spiritually moved by the presence of his native land around him. ’’∂∏ It was true, he admitted, that he hadn’t been eager to get back, but now that he witnessed the country he felt its strong impact. —some parts of its scenery,—some of its small towns, some of its people,—as if I were responsible for them or owned them,’’ he wrote Duus.
D. program at Chicago, Commager arranged to spend the following academic year studying at the University of Copenhagen. There he would be in a proper location to research his dissertation, which would analyze the eighteenth-century political reform movement in Denmark led by Johann Friedrich Struensee. After spending the fall semester in Copenhagen, Commager decided to visit Professor Paul Darmstadter in Göttingen, Germany. Darmstadter was one of those rare nonAmerican historians of the United States.
Only the essays he wrote for journals and magazines escaped this limitation. u During this period, as the Great Depression expanded and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal rose to counter it, Commager continued to write for periodicals, dedicating himself to journalism and scholarship both. But in the surrounding atmosphere of strong ideological turmoil, from what political outlook would he write his articles? In a decade in which communists, socialists, liberals, and conservatives—factions and splinter outlooks too numerous to catalogue—all argued strongly for their separate solutions, toward which section of the political spectrum would he gravitate?