Lawrence William Levine (February 27, 1933 – October 23, 2006) was an American

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

. He was born in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

and died in

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. He was noted for promoting multiculturalism and the perspectives of ordinary people in the study of history.

Life

He graduated from the City College of New York in 1955, and from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, with a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962, where he studied under

Richard Hofstadter Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historic ...

. He taught at Princeton University from 1962 to 1963, and then at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, from 1963 to 1994. After retiring from Berkeley, he taught at George Mason University from 1994 to 2005. He participated in civil rights sit-ins at Berkeley and in the South, and the

Free Speech Movement The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Be ...

. He married Cornelia Roettcher Levine in 1964, with whom he wrote ''The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR''; they had two sons, Joshua Levine and Isaac Levine, and a stepson, Alexander Pimentel.

Awards and honors

Levine was a

MacArthur Fellow The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

in 1983, elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

in 1985 and
Fulbright Scholar
in History from th
University of California - Berkeley
to th
University of Sydney
in 1988. He was president of the Organization of American Historians in 1992–93 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. An award in his name is given by the Organization of American Historians.

Works

* (reprint Harvard University Press, 1987, ) * * * * *

References

External links

"A Conversation with Lawrence Levine: The University Is Not the U.S. Army", ''NEH'', 1997
{{DEFAULTSORT:Levine, Lawrence W. City College of New York alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Columbia University alumni George Mason University faculty 1933 births 2006 deaths MacArthur Fellows 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Historians from California 20th-century American male writers