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George H. Nash (born April 1, 1945) is an American historian and interpreter of
American conservatism Conservatism in the United States is a political and social philosophy based on a belief in limited government, individualism, traditionalism, republicanism, and limited federal governmental power in relation to U.S. states. Conservative ...
. He is a biographer of
Herbert Hoover Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was an American politician who served as the 31st president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 and a member of the Republican Party, holding office during the onset of the Gre ...
. He is best known for ''The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945'', which first appeared in 1976 and has been twice revised and expanded.


Career

Nash graduated from
Amherst College Amherst College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher educati ...
in 1967 and received his Ph.D. in History from
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
in 1973. He is an
independent scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...
who lectures and consults widely. From 1975 to 1995, he lived in Iowa to work at the
Herbert Hoover Presidential Library The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum is the presidential library and burial place of Herbert Clark Hoover, the 31st president of the United States (1929–1933), located on the grounds of the Herbert Hoover National Historic S ...
, where he wrote three volumes of a definitive, scholarly biography, ending in 1918, commissioned by the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association. He did research in hundreds of manuscript collections and archival sources in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Nash published numerous essays on Hoover. Most recently, he edited and wrote a long introduction to ''Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath'' (2011). Nash's essays have appeared in the ''American Spectator'', ''Claremont Review of Books'', ''Intercollegiate Review'', ''Modern'', ''National Review'', ''New York Times Book Review'', ''Policy Review'', ''University Bookman'', ''Wall Street Journal'', and other periodicals. He has lectured at the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson presidential libraries; the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum; the Hoover Institution; the Heritage Foundation; the McConnell Center; and various universities and conferences in the United States and Europe.


Conservatism

In 2019, Nash said, "I would describe myself as a fusionist with a traditionalist tilt", referring to the conservatism promoted by Frank Meyer (1909–1972) in the
National Review ''National Review'' is an American conservative editorial magazine, focusing on news and commentary pieces on political, social, and cultural affairs. The magazine was founded by the author William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. Its editor-in-chief ...
magazine. He accepts capitalism and the individual liberty it requires. But liberty is not enough, he believes, and he stresses the importance of religion and the pursuit of personal virtue, as argued by the conservative traditionalists.Gonzalez, "Conservatism’s Historian". In mid-2019, Nash evaluated the Trump presidency:
Nash argues that Trump has shattered the fusionist consensus within conservatism. On every front, Nash claims, Trump has challenged or subverted the conservative orthodoxy. He has abandoned the doctrine of free trade in favor of protectionism. He pays lip service to traditionalist concerns, and he pursues pro-life policies, but his past positions and personal conduct clash with social-conservative sensibilities. He has called into question the merits of the NATO alliance, sounding, when he does, like an isolationist. For Nash, Trump is in many ways an aberration from, rather than a fulfilment of, the ideas of the conservative intellectual movement.


Awards and honors

From 1987 to 1990, Nash served on the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS), a federal agency. He has served on the editorial advisory board of ''Modern Age'' and is a Senior Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. Since 2004, he has been an Associate of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University. From 2006 to 2008, he served as president of the
Philadelphia Society The Philadelphia Society is a membership organization the purpose of which is "to sponsor the interchange of ideas through discussion and writing, in the interest of deepening the intellectual foundation of a free and ordered society, and of bro ...
. In 2008, he was the recipient of the annual Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters, created by the Ingersoll Foundation. In 2014, he joined the National Advisory Board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.


Evaluations

Historian Jennifer Burns, evaluating ''The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945'' concluded in 2004:
It is a rare work of history that remains the authoritative treatment of its subject nearly thirty years after publication, cited by numerous contemporary historians for its content and scholarship rather than as an historiographical curio.... Nash's book, based on his Harvard dissertation, has become literally the first and last word on the topic.... tachieved this dominance because he was the first historian to cast aside the stale interpretive legacies of the 1950s....Today, his work exerts a deep influence on our common understanding of conservatism in America, an influence that is deserved but nonetheless in need of critical appraisal.
Examining conservative intellectual history, Kim Phillips-Fein writes in 2011:
The most influential synthesis of the subject remains George H. Nash's ''The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945,'' first published in 1976. Nash sought to counter the condescension of the consensus scholars who assumed that conservatives had no serious intellectual life. He argued that postwar conservatism brought together three powerful and partially contradictory intellectual currents that previously had largely been independent of each other: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism. Each particular strain of thought had predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and ''National Review''. The fusion of these different, competing, and not easily reconciled schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right."
Phillips-Fein concludes, "There is, as yet, no work of intellectual history that challenges Nash's synthesis, and it is difficult to overstate the impact that it still has on the field." Historian Ellis W. Hawley, evaluating the first volume of the Hoover biography in the ''American Historical Review'', says that Nash's descriptive detail ranges from "rich and fascinating" to "excessive and tedious." Hawley concludes:
Throughout, the quality of the scholarship, the sifting and use of evidence, the imaginative reconstruction of relevant historical contexts, and the ability to communicate all deserve high marks."
Historian Stanley Shapiro calls the third volume "definitive," saying it belongs to "a special class of scholarly achievements: meticulous in archival research, richly detailed, magisterial in its command of the domestic and international politics of the war period, and always patient and even-handed in judging men and events."Stanley Shapiro, "Feature review: Biography," ''History: Reviews of New Books,'' Summer 1996, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p. 189


Publications


Articles

* "Forgotten Godfathers: Premature Jewish Conservatives and the Rise of ''National Review''." '' American Jewish History'', vol. 87, no. 2/3 (June/September 1999), pp. 123–157.


Books

* ''From Radicalism to Revolution: The Political Career of Josiah Quincy'' (1970) * ''The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945'' (1976) * ''The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer 1874–1914'' (Life of Herbert Hoover, vol. 1) (1983) * ''The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914–1917'' (Life of Herbert Hoover, vol. 2) (1988)
excerpt and text search
* ''Herbert Hoover and Stanford University'' (1988) * ''The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies, 1917–1918'' (Life of Herbert Hoover, Vol. 3) (1996
excerpt and text search
* ''Books and the Founding Fathers.''
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...
: Center for the Book (2007) * ''Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism'' (2009
excerpt and text search


Editor

* co-editor, ''Province in Rebellion: History of the Founding of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1774–1775''.
Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retir ...
(1975) * Hoover, Herbert. ''Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath'' (
Hoover Institution Press The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; abbreviated as Hoover) is an American public policy think tank and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and ...
(2011) . * Hoover, Herbert. ''The Crusade Years, 1933–1955: Herbert Hoover's Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath''.
Hoover Institution Press The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; abbreviated as Hoover) is an American public policy think tank and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and ...
(2013). .


Notes


Further reading

* Burns, Jennifer. "In Retrospect: George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," ''Reviews in American History'' 32#3 (2004) pp. 447–46
online
* Gonzalez, Christian Alejandro. "Conservatism’s Historian: George H. Nash has chronicled the goals and ideals of the American Right for nearly 50 years." ''City Journal'' July 5, 201
online


External links

*
George H. Nash
at
The Russell Kirk Center The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal is a nonprofit educational organization based in Mecosta, Michigan. It was founded in order to continue the legacy of Dr. Russell Kirk, an American political theorist, historian, social critic, litera ...
* Buchanan, Patrick J.br>"Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?"
Review of ''Freedom Betrayed'', edited by George H. Nash.
LewRockwell.com Llewellyn Harrison Rockwell Jr. (born July 1, 1944) is an American author, editor, and political consultant. A libertarian and a self-professed anarcho-capitalist, he founded and is the chairman of the Mises Institute, a non-profit dedicated to ...
(December 9, 2014) {{DEFAULTSORT:Nash, George H. 1945 births Living people 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers Amherst College alumni Harvard University alumni Herbert Hoover Historians of the United States Conservatism in the United States American male non-fiction writers