Alan Zelick Trachtenberg (March 22, 1932 – August 18, 2020) was an American historian and the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and professor emeritus of American Studies at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

. Born in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

, Trachtenberg attended Temple University, and earned his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

American Studies American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, history, society, and culture. It traditionally incorporates literary criticism, historiography and critical theory. Schol ...

at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

, writing his dissertation on the Brooklyn Bridge in American literature. Trachtenberg taught at Penn State for eight years, then spent a year at the Stanford

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) is an interdisciplinary research lab at Stanford University that offers a residential postdoctoral fellowship program for scientists and scholars studying "the five core social and ...

, before joining the faculty at Yale in 1969. He resided in Hamden, Connecticut with his wife Betty (née Glassman), pianist and college administrator, was Dean of Students at

from 1987 to 2007. Trachtenberg's landmark 1990 book, ''Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to

Walker Evans Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from ...

– A Study of American Photography from 1839 to 1938'', won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize that year.

Selected works

* ''Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas,'' Hill and Wang, 2007, . * ''Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930'', Hill and Wang, 2004, . * ''Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris'' (with Ralph Lieberman) exh. cat. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Merrill, 2002. . * ''Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans'', Hill and Wang, 1990, . * ''The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age'', Hill and Wang, 1982, . * ''Hart Crane, A Collection of Critical Essays''. Prentice-Hall, 1982. . * ''Classic Essays in Photography'' (editor), Leetes Island Books, 1981, . * ''Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol'', University Of Chicago Press, 1965, .

References

External links

''The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age''
online version. *Photographi
portrait
by Walker Evans, 1974, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tribute
in the online ''Yale News'', August 18, 2020. 1932 births 2020 deaths Writers from Philadelphia University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts alumni Yale University faculty 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers American academics of English literature Jewish American historians Historians of photography 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American Jews {{US-English-academic-bio-stub