List Of American Historians
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The historiography of the United States refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to study the history of the United States. While history examines the interplay of events in the past, historiography examines the secondary sources written by historians as books and articles, evaluates the primary sources they use, and provides a critical examination of the methodology of historical study.


Organizations

Historians have formed scores of scholarly organizations, which typically hold annual conferences where scholarly papers are presented, and which publish scholarly journals. In addition, every state and many localities have their own historical societies, focused on their own histories and sources. The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest and largest society for professional historians in the U.S. Founded in 1884, it promotes historical studies covering all continents and time periods, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials. It publishes '' The American Historical Review'' five times a year, with scholarly articles and book reviews. While the AHA is the largest organization for historians working in the United States, the
Organization of American Historians The Organization of American Historians (OAH), formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, is the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history. OAH's members in the U.S. and abroad inc ...
(OAH) is the major organization for historians who study and teach about the United States. Formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, its membership comprises college and university professors, as well as graduate students, independent historians, archivists, museum curators, and other public historians. The OAH publishes the quarterly scholarly journal '' Journal of American History''. In 2010 its individual membership was 8,000 and its institutional membership 1,250, and its operating budget was approximately $2.9 million Other large regional groups for professionals include the Southern Historical Association, founded in 1934 for white historians teaching in the South. It now chiefly specializes in the history of the South. In 1970 it elected its first black president, John Hope Franklin. The
Western History Association The Western History Association (WHA), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, was founded in 1961 at Santa Fe, New Mexico by Ray Allen Billington et al. Included in the field of study are the American West and western Canada. The Western History ...
formed in 1961 to bring together both professional scholars and amateur writers dealing with the West. Dozens of other organizations deal in specialized topics, such as the Society for Military History and the Social Science History Association.


Pre-1800

During the colonial era, there were a handful of serious scholars—most of them men of affairs who wrote about their own colony. They included Robert Beverley (1673–1722) on Virginia, Thomas Hutchinson (1711–1780) on Massachusetts, and Samuel Smith on Pennsylvania. The Loyalist Thomas Jones (1731–1792) wrote on New York from exile.


1780–1860

The historiography of the Early National period focused on the American Revolution and the Constitution. The first studies came from
Federalist The term ''federalist'' describes several political beliefs around the world. It may also refer to the concept of parties, whose members or supporters called themselves ''Federalists''. History Europe federation In Europe, proponents of de ...
historians, such as Chief Justice
John Marshall John Marshall (September 24, 1755July 6, 1835) was an American politician and lawyer who served as the fourth Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 until his death in 1835. He remains the longest-serving chief justice and fourth-longes ...
(1755–1835). Marshall wrote a well-received four-volume of biography of George Washington that was far more than a biography, and covered the political and military history of the Revolutionary Era. Marshall emphasized Washington's virtue and military prowess. Historians have complimented his highly accurate detail, but note that Marshall—like many early historians—relied heavily on the ''Annual Register,'' edited by
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. Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) wrote her own history favoring the Jeffersonian perspective stressing natural rights and equality. She emphasized the dangers to republicanism emanating from Britain, and called for the subordination of passion to reason, and the subsuming of private selfishness in the general public good.


Ramsay

David Ramsay (1749–1815), an important Patriot leader from South Carolina, wrote thorough, scholarly histories of his state and the early United States. Trained as a physician, he was a moderate Federalist in politics. Messer (2002) examines the transition in Ramsay's republican perspective from his ''History of the American Revolution'' (1789) and his biography of Washington (1807) to his more conservative ''History of the United States'' (3 vol. 1816–17), which was part of his 12-volume world history. Ramsay called on citizens to demonstrate republican virtues in helping reform and improve society. A conservative, he warned of the dangers of zealotry and the need to preserve existing institutions. O'Brien (1994) says Ramsay's 1789 ''History of the American Revolution'' was one of the earliest and most successful histories. It located American values within the European Enlightenment. Ramsay had no brief for what later was known as American exceptionalism, holding that the destiny of the new nation United States would be congruent with European political and cultural development.


Hildreth

Richard Hildreth (1807–1865), a Yankee scholar and political writer, wrote a thorough highly precise history of the nation down to 1820. His six-volume ''History of the United States'' (1849–52) was dry and heavily factual—he rarely made a mistake in terms of names, dates, events and speeches. His Federalist views and dry style lost market share to George Bancroft's more exuberant and democratic tomes. Hildreth explicitly favored the
Federalist Party The Federalist Party was a Conservatism in the United States, conservative political party which was the first political party in the United States. As such, under Alexander Hamilton, it dominated the national government from 1789 to 1801. De ...
and denigrated the Jeffersonians. He was an active political commentator and leading anti-slavery intellectual, so President Lincoln gave him a choice diplomatic assignment in Europe.


Bancroft

George Bancroft (1800–1891), trained in the leading German universities, was a Democratic politician and accomplished scholar, whose magisterial ''History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent'' covered the new nation in depth down to 1789. Bancroft was imbued with the spirit of Romanticism, emphasizing the emergence of nationalism and republican values, and rooting on every page for the Patriots. His masterwork started appearing in 1834, and he constantly revised it in numerous editions. Along with
John Gorham Palfrey John Gorham Palfrey (May 2, 1796 – April 26, 1881) was an American clergyman and historian who served as a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts. A Unitarian minister, he played a leading role in the early history of Harvard Divinity S ...
(1796–1881), he wrote the most comprehensive history of colonial America. Billias argues Bancroft played on four recurring themes to explain how America developed its unique values: providence, progress, patria, and pan-democracy. "Providence" meant that destiny depended more on God than on human will. The idea of "progress" indicated that through continuous reform a better society was possible. "Patria" (love of country) was deserved because America's spreading influence would bring liberty and freedom to more and more of the world. "Pan-democracy" meant the nation-state was central to the drama, not specific heroes or villains. Bancroft was an indefatigable researcher who had a thorough command of the sources, but his rotund romantic style and enthusiastic patriotism annoyed later generations of scientific historians, who did not assign his books to students. Furthermore, scholars of the "Imperial School" after 1890 took a much more favorable view of the benign intentions of the British Empire than he did.


Creating and preserving collective memory

In 1791 the
Massachusetts Historical Society The Massachusetts Historical Society is a major historical archive specializing in early American, Massachusetts, and New England history. The Massachusetts Historical Society was established in 1791 and is located at 1154 Boylston Street in Bost ...
became the nation's first state historical society; it was a private association of well-to-do individuals with sufficient leisure, interest, and resources for the society to prosper. It set a model that every state followed, although usually with a more popular base and state funding. Archivist Elizabeth Kaplan argues the founding of a historical society begins an upward spiral with each advance legitimizing the next. Collections are gathered that support publication of documents and histories. These publications in turn give the society and its topic legitimacy and authenticity. The process creates a sense of identity and belonging. The builders of state historical societies and archives in the late 19th and early 20th century were more than antiquarians—they had the mission of creating as well as preserving and disseminating the collective memories of their communities. The largest and most professional collections were built at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison by Lyman Draper (1852–1887) and Reuben Gold Thwaites (1887–1913). Their extensive collection of books and documents became (and remain) a major scholarly resource for the graduate program in history at the University of Wisconsin. Thwaites disseminated materials nationally through his edited series, especially ''Jesuit Relations in 73 volumes, ''Early Western Travels'' in 32 volumes, and ''Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition'' in eight volumes, among others. At the national level, major efforts to collect and publish important documents from the revolutionary era were undertaken by
Jonathan Elliott Jonathan Elliott is an American composer and teacher. Born in 1962, Elliott grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, studying piano from the age of six. He went on to study composition at Vassar College, where his teachers included Annea Lockwood and ...
(1784–1846), Jared Sparks (1789–1866), Peter Force (1790–1868) and other editors. The military history of the Civil War especially fascinated Americans, and the War Department compiled and published a massive collection of original documents that continues to be heavily used by scholars. The '' Official Records of the War of the Rebellion'' appeared in 128 large volumes published between 1881 and 1901. It included military and naval records from both sides, as well as important documents from state and national governments.


Colonial and Revolution


Imperial School

While most historians saw the colonial era as a prelude to the Revolution, by the 1890s the "Imperial School" was interpreting it as an expression of the British Empire. The leaders included
Herbert L. Osgood Herbert Levi Osgood (April 9, 1855 – September 11, 1918) was an American historian of colonial American history. As a professor at Columbia University he directed numerous dissertations of scholars who became major historians. Osgood was a l ...
,
George Louis Beer George Louis Beer (July 26, 1872 – March 15, 1920) was a renowned American historian of the "Imperial school". Early life and education Born in Staten Island, New York, to an affluent family that was prominent in New York's German-Jewish ...
,
Charles M. Andrews Charles McLean Andrews (February 22, 1863 – September 9, 1943) was an American historian, an authority on American colonial history.Roth, David M., editor, and Grenier, Judith Arnold, associate editor, "Connecticut History and Culture: An Histo ...
and Lawrence Henry Gipson. Andrews, based at Yale, was the most influential. They took a highly favorable view of the benefits achieved by the economic integration of the Empire. The school practically died out by 1940, but Gipson published his fifteen-volume history of ''The British Empire Before the American Revolution'' (1936–70) and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize in History.


Progressive historians

Progressive historians such as
Carl L. Becker Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 – April 10, 1945) was an American historian of the Age of Enlightenment in America and Europe. Life He was born in Waterloo, Iowa. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1893 as an undergraduate, an ...
,
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr. (; February 27, 1888 – October 30, 1965) was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material caus ...
,
Vernon L. Parrington Vernon Louis Parrington (August 3, 1871 – June 16, 1929) was an American literary historian and scholar. His three-volume history of American letters, ''Main Currents in American Thought'', won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928 and was one ...
, and
Charles A. Beard Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948) was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the f ...
downplayed the Patriot grievances of the 1760s and 1770s as rhetorical exercises that covered the greed of smugglers and merchants who wanted to avoid taxes. Schlesinger argued the false propaganda was effective: "The stigmatizing of British policy as 'tyranny,' 'oppression' and 'slavery, had little or no objective reality, at least prior to the Intolerable Acts but ceaseless repetition of the charge kept emotions at fever pitch." The Progressive interpretation was dominant before 1960, as historians downplayed rhetoric as superficial and looked for economic motivations.


Republicanism

In the 1960s and 1970s, a new interpretation emerged that emphasized the primacy of ideas as motivating forces in history (rather than material self-interest).
Bernard Bailyn Bernard Bailyn (September 10, 1922 – August 7, 2020) was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Pri ...
, Gordon Wood from Harvard formed the "Cambridge School"; at Washington University the "St. Louis School" was led by
J.G.A. Pocock John Greville Agard Pocock (; born 7 March 1924) is a historian of political thought from New Zealand. He is especially known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period (mostly in Europe, Britain, and America), his work on th ...
. They emphasized slightly different approaches to republicanism. The new discovery was that the colonial intellectual and political leaders in the 1760s and 1770s closely read history to compare governments and their effectiveness of rule. They were especially concerned with the history of liberty in England, and the rights Englishmen, which they claimed were the proper heritage of the colonists. These intellectuals were especially influenced by Britain's "country party" (which opposed the Court Party that actually held power). Country party relied heavily on the classical republicanism of Roman heritage; it celebrated the ideals of duty and virtuous citizenship in a republic. It drew heavily on ancient Greek city-state and Roman republican examples. The Country party roundly denounced the corruption surrounding the "court" party in London centering on the royal court. This approach produced a political ideology Americans called "republicanism", which was widespread in America.by 1775. "Republicanism was the distinctive political consciousness of the entire Revolutionary generation."
J.G.A. Pocock John Greville Agard Pocock (; born 7 March 1924) is a historian of political thought from New Zealand. He is especially known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period (mostly in Europe, Britain, and America), his work on th ...
explained the intellectual sources in America:
Revolutionary Republicanism A revolutionary republic is a form of government whose main tenets are popular sovereignty, rule of law, and representative democracy. It is based in part on the ideas of Whig and Enlightenment thinkers, and was favored by revolutionaries dur ...
was centered on limiting corruption and greed. Virtue was of the utmost importance for citizens and representatives. Revolutionaries took a lesson from ancient Rome, they knew it was necessary to avoid the luxury that had destroyed the Empire. A virtuous citizen was one that ignored monetary compensation and made a commitment to resist and eradicate corruption. The Republic was sacred; therefore it is necessary to served the state in a truly representative way, ignoring self-interest and individual will. Republicanism required the service of those who were willing to give up their own interests for a common good. According to
Bernard Bailyn Bernard Bailyn (September 10, 1922 – August 7, 2020) was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Pri ...
, "The preservation of liberty rested on the ability of the people to maintain effective checks on wielders of power and hence in the last analysis rested on the vigilance and moral stamina of the people." Virtuous citizens needed to be strong defenders of liberty and challenge the corruption and greed in government. The duty of the virtuous citizen become a foundation for the American Revolution.


Atlantic history

Since the 1980s a major trend has been to locate the colonial and revolutionary eras in the wider context of Atlantic history, with emphasis on the multiple interactions among the Americas, Europe and Africa. Leading promoters include
Bernard Bailyn Bernard Bailyn (September 10, 1922 – August 7, 2020) was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Pri ...
at Harvard, and Jack P. Greene at Johns Hopkins University.


Turnerian School

The ''Frontier Thesis'' or ''Turner Thesis'', is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that the origin of the distinctive egalitarian, democratic, aggressive, and innovative features of the American character has been the
American frontier The American frontier, also known as the Old West or the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of United States territorial acquisitions, American expansion in mainland North Amer ...
experience. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. In the thesis, the frontier established liberty by releasing Americans from European mind-sets and ending prior customs of the 19th century. The Turner thesis came under attack from the "New Western Historians" after 1970 who wanted to limit western history to the western states, with a special emphasis on the 20th century, women and minorities.


Beardian School

The Beardians were led by
Charles A. Beard Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948) was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the f ...
(1874–1948), who wrote hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science. The most controversial was '' An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States'' (1913), which indicated that the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution in 1787 were motivated more by the fate of financial investments than anything idealistic. He wrote:
The overwhelming majority of members, at least five-sixths, were immediately, directly, and personally interested in the outcome of their labors at Philadelphia.
Beard's most influential book, written with his wife Mary Beard, was the wide-ranging and bestselling ''The Rise of American Civilization'' (1927). It had a major influence on a generation of American historians. Prominent Beardian historians included
C. Vann Woodward Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 – December 17, 1999) was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of un ...
,
Howard K. Beale Howard Kennedy Beale (April 8, 1899 – December 27, 1959) was an American historian. He had several temporary appointments before becoming a professor of history at the University of North Carolina in 1935. His most famous student was C. Vann Wo ...
, Fred Harvey Harrington, Jackson Turner Main, and Richard Hofstadter (in his early years) Similar to Beard in his economic interpretation, and almost as influential in the 1930s and 1940s was literary scholar
Vernon Louis Parrington Vernon Louis Parrington (August 3, 1871 – June 16, 1929) was an American literary historian and scholar. His three-volume history of American letters, ''Main Currents in American Thought'', won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928 and was one ...
. Beard was famous as a political liberal, but he strenuously opposed American entry into World War II, for which he blamed Franklin D. Roosevelt more than Japan or Germany. This isolationist stance destroyed his reputation among scholars. By about 1960 they also abandoned his materialistic model of class conflict. Richard Hofstadter concluded in 1968:
Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival.
However the Wisconsin School of diplomatic history in the 1960s adopted a neo-Beardian model, as expressed at the University of Wisconsin by a number of scholars, most notably William Appleman Williams in ''The Tragedy of American Diplomacy'' (1959) but also Walter LaFeber in ''The New Empire'' (1963). At p. 81. The idea was that material advantage, especially foreign markets for surplus goods, was more of a motivating force among American decision-makers in foreign affairs than was spreading liberty to the world. Wisconsin School historians generally thought that it was possible to correct this decision-making emphasis on markets and doing so would make for a more effective American diplomacy. At p. 7. A different strain of historical thought in the 1960s was associated with the
New Left The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, g ...
and incorporated more radical interpretations of American diplomatic history. These scholars included Marxists such as Gabriel Kolko, who generally felt that there were fundamental structural causes, due to the needs of American capitalism, behind American foreign policy and that little could reverse that short of an outright remaking of the economic system.


Consensus historiography: Americans in political agreement

To replace Beardianism "consensus" historiography emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s, with such leaders,both liberal and conservative, as Prominent leaders included Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz,
Daniel J. Boorstin Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004) was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history. He was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in ...
and
David M. Potter David Morris Potter (December 6, 1910 – February 18, 1971) was an American historian specializing in the study of the American South and the American Civil War. He was born in Augusta, Georgia, graduated from the Academy of Richmond County, an ...
. Other prominent exemplars included
Perry Miller Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller (February 25, 1905 – December 9, 1963) was an American intellectual historian and a co-founder of the field of American Studies. Miller specialized in the history of early America, and took an active role in a revis ...
, Clinton Rossiter,
Henry Steele Commager Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) was an American historian. As one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, with 40 books and 700 essays and reviews, he helped define modern liberalism in the United States. In the 19 ...
, Allan Nevins and Edmund Morgan. Eric Foner, a liberal, says that Hofstadter's book ''The American Political Tradition'' (1948) "propelled him to the very forefront of his profession." Millions of Americans, on and off campus, read it. Its format is a series of portraits of leading men from the Founding Fathers through Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR. Foner argues: Hofstadter's insight was that virtually all his subjects held essentially the same underlying beliefs. Instead of persistent conflict (whether between agrarians and industrialists, capital and labor, or Democrats and Republicans), American history was characterize by broad agreement on fundamentals, particularly the virtues of individual liberty, private property, and capitalist enterprise.


Native Americans

According to historian David Rich Lewis, American popular histories, film and fiction have given enormous emphasis to the Indian wars. From a professional standpoint, he argues, "American Indian history has a venerable past and boasts a tremendous volume of scholarship judging by the published bibliographies." Lewis adds, "it has been difficult to distract academics or the public from the drama of Indian wars. Most of the older histories of Indians and the American West emphasized this warfare and the victimization of Indian peoples." After 1970 new ethnohistorical approaches appeared providing an anthropological perspective that deepened understanding of the Indian perspective. The new scholarly emphasis on victimization mentored by the 1980s scholars were dealing more harshly with the U.S. government's failures and emphasizing the impact of the wars on native peoples and their cultures. An influential book in popular history was Dee Brown's '' Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee'' (1970). In academic history,
Francis Jennings Francis "Fritz" Jennings (1918November 17, 2000) was an American historian, best known for his works on the colonial history of the United States. He taught at Cedar Crest College from 1968 to 1976, and at the Moore College of Art from 1966 to 1 ...
's ''The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest'' (New York: Norton, 1975) was notable for strong attacks on the Puritans and rejection of traditional portrayal of the wars between the indigenous peoples and colonists.


Slavery and Black history

The history of slavery originally was the history of the government's laws and policies toward slavery, and the political debates about it. Black history was a specially promoted very largely at predominantly black colleges. The situation changed dramatically with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. Attention shifted to the enslaved humans, the free blacks, and the struggles of the black community against adversity.
Peter Kolchin Peter Robert Kolchin (born June 3, 1943) is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor. He won the Bancroft P ...
described the state of historiography in the early 20th century as follows: Historians
James Oliver Horton James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (disambiguat ...
and Lois E. Horton described Phillips' mindset, methodology and influence: The racist attitude concerning slaves carried over into the historiography of the Dunning School of
Reconstruction era The Reconstruction era was a period in American history following the American Civil War (1861–1865) and lasting until approximately the Compromise of 1877. During Reconstruction, attempts were made to rebuild the country after the bloo ...
history, which dominated in the early 20th century. Writing in 2005, the historian Eric Foner states: Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, historiography moved away from the "overt" racism of the Phillips era. Historians still emphasized the slave as an object. Whereas Phillips presented the slave as the object of benign attention by the owners, historians such as
Kenneth Stampp Kenneth Milton Stampp (12 July 191210 July 2009), Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (1946–1983), was a celebrated historian of slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstr ...
emphasized the mistreatment and abuse of the slave. In the portrayal of the slave as victim, the historian
Stanley M. Elkins Stanley Maurice Elkins (April 27, 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts – September 16, 2013 in Leeds, Massachusetts) was an American historian, best known for his unique and controversial comparison of slavery in the United States to Nazi concen ...
in his 1959 work "Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life" compared the effects of United States slavery to that resulting from the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps. He stated the institution destroyed the will of the slave, creating an "emasculated, docile Sambo" who identified totally with the owner. Elkins' thesis was challenged by historians. Gradually historians recognized that in addition to the effects of the owner-slave relationship, slaves did not live in a "totally closed environment but rather in one that permitted the emergence of enormous variety and allowed slaves to pursue important relationships with persons other than their master, including those to be found in their families, churches and communities."
Robert W. Fogel Robert William Fogel (; July 1, 1926 – June 11, 2013) was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen ...
and
Stanley L. Engerman Stanley Lewis Engerman (born March 14, 1936) is an economist and economic historian at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1962 from Johns Hopkins University. Engerman is known for his quantitative historical work ...
in the 1970s, through their work ''Time on the Cross,'' portrayed slaves as having internalized the Protestant work ethic of their owners. In portraying the more benign version of slavery, they also argue in their 1974 book that the material conditions under which the slaves lived and worked compared favorably to those of free workers in the agriculture and industry of the time. (This was also an argument of Southerners during the 19th century.) In the 1970s and 1980s, historians made use of
archaeological Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
records, black folklore, and statistical data to describe a much more detailed and nuanced picture of slave life. Relying also on 19th-century autobiographies of ex-slaves (known as slave narratives) and the WPA
Slave Narrative Collection ''Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States'' (often referred to as the WPA Slave Narrative Collection) is a collection of histories by formerly enslaved people undertaken by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progre ...
, a set of interviews conducted with former slave interviews in the 1930s by the
Federal Writers' Project The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It ...
of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, historians described slavery as the slaves experienced it. Far from slaves' being strictly victims or content, historians showed slaves as both resilient and autonomous in many of their activities. Despite their exercise of autonomy and their efforts to make a life within slavery, current historians recognize the precariousness of the slave's situation. Slave children quickly learned that they were subject to the direction of both their parents and their owners. They saw their parents disciplined just as they came to realize that they also could be physically or verbally abused by their owners. Historians writing during this era include
John Blassingame John Wesley Blassingame (March 23, 1940 – February 13, 2000) was an American historian and pioneer in the study of slavery in the United States. He was the former chairman of the African-American studies program at Yale University. Blassing ...
(''Slave Community''), Eugene Genovese (''Roll, Jordan, Roll''), Leslie Howard Owens (''This Species of Property''), and
Herbert Gutman Herbert George Gutman (1928–1985) was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history. Early life and education Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigran ...
('' The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom''). Important work on slavery has continued; for instance, in 2003
Steven Hahn Steven Howard Hahn (born 1951) is Professor of History at New York University. Life Hahn was born on July 18, 1951, in New York City. Educated at the University of Rochester, where he worked with Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman, Hahn receiv ...
published the
Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...
-winning account, ''A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration'', which examined how slaves built community and political understanding while enslaved, so they quickly began to form new associations and institutions when emancipated, including black churches separate from white control. In 2010, Robert E. Wright published a model that explains why slavery was more prevalent in some areas than others (e.g. southern than northern Delaware) and why some firms (individuals, corporations, plantation owners) chose slave labor while others used wage, indentured, or family labor instead.Robert E. Wright, Fubarnomics (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2010), 83-116.


Civil War

The Civil War has generated an unusually large historiography. In terms of controversy, historians have long debated the causes of the war, and the relative importance given to nationalism and sectionalism, slavery, and economic issues. Nationalism dominated historiography from the late 19th century and the 1920s, especially as reflected in the work of James Ford Rhodes. In the 1920s, the Beardian school Identified an inevitable conflict between the plantation-based South and the industrial Northeast. When the agrarian Midwest sided with the Northeast, war resulted. In the 1930s, numerous arguments were made that the war was not inevitable, that was caused by a failure of the political system to reach a compromise. Since the 1960s, the emphasis has been very largely on slavery as the cause of the Civil War, with the anti-slavery element in the South committed to blocking the expansion of the slave system because it violated the rights of free white farmers and workers. Southerners responded to this as an intolerable attack on their honor, their economic needs for expansion, and the constitutional states' rights.


Lost Cause of the Confederacy

The ''Lost Cause'' is a collection of popular myths, strongest in the white South, which endorse the virtues of the
antebellum South In History of the Southern United States, the history of the Southern United States, the Antebellum Period (from la, ante bellum, lit=Status quo ante bellum, before the war) spanned the Treaty of Ghent, end of the War of 1812 to the start of ...
and embodied a view of the Civil War as an honorable struggle to maintain those virtues while downplaying the actual role of slavery. The Lost Cause was widely taught in schools across the South. In the late 19th century became a key part of the reconciliation process between North and South around 1900, thereby reuniting the white South with the mainstream national interest. The Lost Cause became the main way that White Southerners commemorated the war. The United Daughters of the Confederacy by 1900 became the major organization promoting the Lost Cause. Historian Caroline E. Janney states:
Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South.
The Lost Cause belief has several historically inaccurate elements. These include claiming that the reason the Confederacy started the Civil War was to defend
state's rights In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the ...
rather than to preserve slavery, or claiming that slavery was benevolent, rather than cruel.


Cold War

As soon as the "
Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
" began about 1947 the origins of the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West became a source of heated controversy among scholars and politicians.Jonathan Nashel, "Cold War (1945–91): Changing Interpretations" ''The Oxford Companion to American Military History''. John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet-U.S. relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides. With the opening of the archives in Moscow and Eastern Europe after 1990, most of the pressing issues have been resolved. The "orthodox" school dominated American historiography from the 1940s until it was challenged by both Wisconsin School and New Left historians in the 1960s. The orthodox school places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.
Thomas A. Bailey Thomas Andrew Bailey (December 14, 1902 – July 26, 1983) was a professor of history at his alma mater, Stanford University, and wrote many historical monographs on diplomatic history, including the widely used American history textbook, ''Th ...
, for example, argued in his 1950 ''America Faces Russia'' that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate postwar years. Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. America responded by drawing the line against Soviet aggression with the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan. The challengers, the "revisionist" school, were originally formed at the University of Wisconsin by William Appleman Williams. This strain of thought became most known via his ''The Tragedy of American Diplomacy'' (1959). Williams suggested America was just as bad as the Soviets because it had always been an empire-building nation, and forced capitalism upon unwilling nations. Revisionists emphasized Soviet weaknesses after 1945, said it only wanted a security zone, and was mostly responding to American provocations. The seminal "post-revisionist" accounts are by
John Lewis Gaddis John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941) is an American international relations scholar, military historian, and writer. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War an ...
, starting with his ''The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947'' (1972) and continuing through his study of ''George F. Kennan: An American Life'' (2011). Gaddis argued that neither side bore sole responsibility, as he emphasized the constraints imposed on American policymakers by domestic politics. Gaddis criticized revisionist scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War.
Ernest R. May Ernest Richard May (November 19, 1928 – June 1, 2009) was an American historian of international relations, whose 14 published books include analyses of American involvement in World War I and the causes of the Fall of France during World War ...
concluded in 1984, "The United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists. ... There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict ... Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience ... all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back."


Social history

Social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...
, often called the new social history, is the history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. It includes topics like demography, women, family, and education. It was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments. In two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. The Social Science History Association, formed in 1976, brings together scholars from numerous disciplines interested in social history and publishes '' Social Science History'' quarterly. The field is also the specialty of the '' Journal of Social History'', edited since 1967 by
Peter Stearns Peter Nathaniel Stearns (born March 3, 1936) is a professor at George Mason University, where he was provost from January 1, 2000 to July 2014. Stearns was chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and also served as the ...
It covers such topics as gender relations; race in American history; the history of personal relationships; consumerism; sexuality; the social history of politics; crime and punishment, and history of the senses. Most of the major historical journals have coverage as well. Social history was practiced by local historians as well as scholars, especially the frontier historians who followed Frederick Jackson Turner, as well as urban historians who followed
Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr. (; February 27, 1888 – October 30, 1965) was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material ca ...
The "new" social history of the 1960s introduced demographic and quantitative techniques. However, after 1990 social history was increasingly challenged by cultural history, which emphasizes language and the importance of beliefs and assumptions and their causal role in group behavior.


Women's history

It is often thought that the field of American women's history became a major field of academic inquiry largely after the 1970s. However, the field has a longer historiography than is generally understood. The earliest histories of American women were authored during the 19th century, largely by non-academic women writers writing for popular audiences or to document the history of women's civic and activist organizations. For example, abolitionists Sarah Grimke and Lydia Maria Child wrote brief histories of women in the 1830s, while Elizabeth Ellet wrote, ''Women of the American Revolution (1848), A Domestic History of the American Revolution (1850), and Pioneer Women of the West (1852''). Meanwhile, women's organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Association of Colored Women set about writing their own institutional histories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while women's patriotic societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy created "filiopietistic" publications on history and women in history, developed school curricula, and engaged in historic preservation work. Both Black and White women in women's clubs actively participated in this work during the twentieth century in their efforts to shape the broader culture. In the early twentieth century for example, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) coordinated efforts across the South to tell the story of the Confederacy and its women on the Confederate home front, while male historians spent their time with battles and generals. The women emphasized female activism, initiative, and leadership. They reported that when all the men left for war, the women took command, found ersatz and substitute foods, rediscovered their old traditional skills with the spinning wheel when factory cloth became unavailable, and ran all the farm or plantation operations. They faced danger without having menfolk in the traditional role of their protectors. Historian
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (born 1943) is an American historian and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship and teaching forwarded the emergence of U.S. women's history in the 1960s and ...
argues that the UDC was a powerful promoter of women's history: While non-academic women in these societies succeeded in shaping public memory and history education in American school houses, albeit along racially segregated lines, the subject of women in American history was largely ignored within the historical discipline during the period in which the discipline professionalized from the 1880s to 1910. The male-dominated discipline saw its purview as relatively limited to the study of the evolution of politics, government, and the law, and emphasized research in official state documents, thus leaving little room for an examination of women's activities or lives. Women's activities were perceived as irretrievable, inadequately documented in the historical record, and occurring in the social and cultural realms. However, with the rise of progressive history in the 1910s and social history in the 1920s and 1930s, some professional historians began to call for more attention to the study of women in American history, or simply incorporated women into their broader historical studies. The most famous call to research and write about the history of American women in this period came from distinguished historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. in his collected essays published as ''New Perspectives in American History'', in 1922. His graduate students and their graduate students would later contribute to the emergence of the scholarly field of American women's history in the ensuing decades. This phase in the field's development culminated in the creation of women's history archives at both Radcliffe College (Harvard's women's coordinate) and Smith College (The Sophia Smith Collection). The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Harvard), for example, was founded in 1943 as the Radcliffe Woman's Archives. Between 1957 and 1971, this library produced a seminal scholarly reference work on women in American history, ''Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 1607–1950''. It coordinated the work of hundreds of historians—men and women—and was published to widespread acclaim in 1971. Academic historians, meanwhile, sporadically produced and reviewed scholarly monographs in American women's history from the 1930s through the 1950s as well. The work of Alma Lutz, Elizabeth Anthony Dexter, Julia Cherry Spruill, Antoinette Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Elizabeth Massey, Caroline Ware, Eleanor Flexner, and Mary Beard for example, all focused on the history of American women and was relatively well known during their time even if some of these scholars did not enjoy insider status within the historical profession. In response to the new social history of the 1960s and the modern women's movement, increasing numbers of scholars, especially women graduate students training in universities across the country, began to focus on the history of women. They struggled to find mentors in male dominated history departments initially. Students in the Columbia University History Department produced several early significant works in the 1960s. Gerda Lerner's dissertation, published as ''The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina'' in 1967, and Aileen Kraditor's ''The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement'' (1965) are just two notable examples. Anne Firor Scott, a graduate of Harvard who studied under Oscar Handlin in the 1950s, wrote a dissertation on women in the Southern Progressive movement and by 1970 had published ''The Southern Lady: From the Pedesta''l ''to Politics''. These new ventures into women's history were made within mainstream academic institutions. Lerner and Scott would become leading lights and organizers for the field's younger practitioners in the coming decades. Their contributions to American history were recognized by the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association when they were elected to the presidencies of those professional organizations in the 1980s. The field of women's history exploded dramatically after 1969. New historians of women organized within the major national historical associations from 1969 forward to promote scholarship about women. This included the American Historical Association, the Organization of American History, and the Southern Historical Association. The mostly women historians created status of women committees in these male dominated associations and made developing women's history a major focus of their professional and intellectual activism. They started by gathering data and writing bibliographies in the field to identify areas in need of study. Then they painstakingly completed the research and produced the monographs that vitalized this field. They also created around a dozen regional women's history organizations and conference groups of their own to support their scholarly work and build intellectual and professional networks. These included the
Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession The Coordinating Council for Women in History is a national professional organization for women historians in the United States. It was founded in 1969 as the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession to promote recruitment and s ...
—Conference Group on Women's History (1969), the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (1973), West Coast Association of Women Historians (1970), Women Historians of the Midwest(1973), Southern Association for Women Historians (1970), Upstate New York Women's History Organization (1975), New England Association of Women Historians (1972), Association of Black Women Historians (1979), and others. The scholarship this growing cohort of historians created was soon vast, diverse, and theoretically complex. Almost from its inception, the new women's history of the 1970s focused on the differential experiences of white women of diverse backgrounds, women of color, working-class women, relations of power between men and women, and how to integrate women's history into mainstream American history narratives. There was a pervasive concern with understanding the impact of race, class, gender, and sexuality on the histories of women—despite later claims to the contrary. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, American women's historians like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Joan Kelley were considering sexual relations of power, sex roles, the problem of fitting women's history into traditional frameworks of periodization and Joan Wallach Scott's call to apply gender as a "Useful Category of Historical Analysis." In the U.S., historians of women in Europe, America, and the World collaborated by working together in the discipline's professional institutions and sharing one another's theoretical insights to strengthen the standing of women's history in academia broadly. An important development of the 1980s was the fuller integration of women into the history of race and slavery and race into the history of women. This work was preceded by the work of Black club women, historic preservationists, archivists, and educators of the early twentieth century. Gerda Lerner published a significant document reader, ''Black Women in White America'' in 1972 (Pantheon Publishers). Deborah Gray White's ''Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South'' (1985), helped to open up analysis of race, slavery, abolitionism and feminism, as well as resistance, power, activism, and themes of violence, sexualities, and the body. The professional service and scholarship of Darlene Clark Hine, Rosalyn Terborg -Penn, and Nell Irvin Painter on African American women also broke important ground in the 1980s and 1990s. By the late 1980s women's history in the United States had matured and proliferated enough to support its own stand alone scholarly journals to showcase scholarship in the field. The major women's history journal published in the U.S. is ''The Journal of Women's History,'' launched in 1989 by Joan Hoff and Christie Farnham Pope. It was first published out of Indiana University and continues to be published quarterly today. Indeed, the field became so prolific and established by the turn of the 21st century in fact that it had become one of the most commonly claimed fields of specialization of all professional historians in the U.S., according to Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association. Major trends in the history of American women in recent years have emphasized the study of global and transnational histories of women, and histories of conservative women. Women's history continues to be a robust and prolific field in the United States, and new scholarship is published regularly in the history discipline's mainstream, regional, and subfield specific journals.


Urban history

Urban history has long been practiced by amateurs who from the late 19th century have written detailed histories of their own cities. Academic interest began with
Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr. (; February 27, 1888 – October 30, 1965) was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material ca ...
at Harvard in the 1920s, and his successor
Oscar Handlin Oscar Handlin (1915–2011) 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 ...
. The "new urban history" emerged in the 1960s as a branch of
Social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...
seeking to understand the "city as process" and, through quantitative methods, to learn more about the inarticulate masses in the cities, as opposed to the mayors and elites. Much of the attention is devoted to individual behavior, and how the intermingling of classes and ethnic groups operated inside a particular city. Smaller cities are much easier to handle when it comes to tracking a sample of individuals over ten or 20 years. Common themes include the social and political changes, examinations of class formation, and racial/ethnic tensions. A major early study was Stephan Thernstrom's ''Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City'' (1964), which used census records to study
Newburyport, Massachusetts Newburyport is a coastal city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, northeast of Boston. The population was 18,289 at the 2020 census. A historic seaport with vibrant tourism industry, Newburyport includes part of Plum Island. The mo ...
, 1850–1880. A seminal, landmark book, it sparked interest in the 1960s and 1970s in quantitative methods, census sources, "bottom-up" history, and the measurement of upward social mobility by different ethnic groups. Rather than being strictly areas of geographical segmentation, spatial patterns and concepts of place reveal the struggles for power of various social groups, including gender, class, race, and ethnic identity. The spatial patterns of residential and business areas give individual cities their distinct identities and, considering the social aspects attendant to the patterns, create a more complete picture of how those cities evolved, shaping the lives of their citizens. Recent techniques include the use of historical
GIS A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...
data.


Teaching

The great majority of leading scholars have been teachers at universities and colleges. However, professionalization and the academic advancement system gives priority to graduate-level research and publication, and to the teaching of advanced graduate students. Issues regarding the teaching at the undergraduate level or below have been promoted by the associations, but have not become main themes. American studies was seldom taught in Europe or Asia before the Second World War. Since then, American studies has had a limited appeal and typically involves a combination of American literature and some history. Europe's approach has been highly sensitive to the changes in the political climate.
Tibor Frank Tibor Frank (3 February 1948 – 15 September 2022) was a Hungarian historian who was professor of history at the School of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). He was director of ...
, "European Perspectives Of United States History Since World War II, '' Halcyone'' (01986449). (1991), Vol. 13, pp 169-179


Prominent historians working in the U.S.


Historians born before 1900

*
Henry Brooks Adams Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. Presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Fra ...
, (1838–1918), US 1800–1816 *
Charles McLean Andrews Charles McLean Andrews (February 22, 1863 – September 9, 1943) was an American historian, an authority on American colonial history.Roth, David M., editor, and Grenier, Judith Arnold, associate editor, "Connecticut History and Culture: An Histo ...
, (1863–1943), colonial * Harry Elmer Barnes, (1889–1958) World wars * George Bancroft, (1800–1891), colonial and Revolution * Hubert Howe Bancroft, (1832–1918) West * Eugene C. Barker (1874–1956), Texas *
Charles A. Beard Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948) was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the f ...
, (1874–1948), political, economic and social * Mary Ritter Beard, (1876–1958), social * Samuel Flagg Bemis, (1891–1973) diplomatic * Bruce Catton, (1899–1978) Civil War * Edward Channing, (1856–1931), political *
E. Merton Coulter Ellis Merton Coulter (1890–1981) was an American historian of the South, author, and a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. For four decades, he was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was ...
, (1890–1981) South *
Avery Craven Avery Odelle Craven (August 12, 1885 – January 21, 1980) was an American historian who wrote extensively about the nineteenth-century United States, the American Civil War and Congressional Reconstruction from a then-revisionist viewpoint sym ...
, (1885–1980), Civil War * Merle Curti, (1897–1997), intellectual, social, peace * Angie Debo, (1890–1988), Native American and Oklahoma history * Bernard DeVoto, (1897–1955), West * W.E.B. Du Bois, (1868–1963) Reconstruction *
Walter Lynwood Fleming Walter Lynwood Fleming (1874–1932) was an American historian of the South and Reconstruction. He was a leader of the Dunning School of scholars in the early 20th century, who addressed Reconstruction era history using historiographical techn ...
, (1874–1932), Reconstruction * Douglas Southall Freeman (1886–1953), Washington, Lee * Richard Hildreth, (1807–1865) political *
J. Franklin Jameson John Franklin Jameson (September 19, 1859 – September 28, 1937) was an American historian, author, and journal editor who played a major role in the professional activities of American historians in the early 20th century. He helped establish t ...
(1859–1937), editor and archivist * Leonard Woods Labaree, (1897–1980) editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers * Dumas Malone, (1892–1986), Jefferson * Samuel Eliot Morison, (1887–1976) naval, American colonial * Allan Nevins, (1890–1971) political and business; Civil War; biography *
John Gorham Palfrey John Gorham Palfrey (May 2, 1796 – April 26, 1881) was an American clergyman and historian who served as a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts. A Unitarian minister, he played a leading role in the early history of Harvard Divinity S ...
, (1796–1881) New England * Francis Parkman (1832–1893), Canada, French and Indian wars *
James Parton James Parton (February 9, 1822 – October 17, 1891) was an English-born American biographer who wrote books on the lives of Horace Greeley, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and contributed three bio ...
, (1822–1891), political biography * James Ford Rhodes, (1848–1927) Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age *
Hester Dorsey Richardson Hester Dorsey Richardson (, Dorsey; pen name, Selene; January 9, 1862 – December 10, 1933) was an American author of several historical studies of Maryland, as well as a genealogist and clubwoman. Among her publications were ''The Origin and Cus ...
(1862-1933), biography, Maryland * Theodore Roosevelt, (1858–1919), West, naval * George Sarton, (1884–1956), history of science *
Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr. (; February 27, 1888 – October 30, 1965) was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material ca ...
(1888–1965), social, urban *
James Schouler James Schouler (March 20, 1839 – April 16, 1920) was an American lawyer and historian best known for his historical work ''History of the United States under the Constitution, 1789–1865''. Biography Schouler was born in West Cambridge (now ...
, (1839–1920) political *
Justin Harvey Smith Justin Harvey Smith (born January 13, 1857, Boscawen, New Hampshire; died March 21, 1930, Brooklyn, New York) was an American historian and specialist on the Mexican–American War. Smith was educated at Dartmouth College (B.A. 1877; M.A. 1881) an ...
, (1857–1930) Mexican–American War * Frederick Jackson Turner, (1861–1932), West, methodology *
Charles H. Wesley Charles Harris Wesley (December 2, 1891 – August 16, 1987) was an American historian, educator, minister, and author. He published more than 15 books on African-American history, taught for decades at Howard University, and served as president ...
, (1891–1987) black history *
Justin Winsor Justin Winsor (January 2, 1831October 22, 1897) was an American writer, librarian, and historian. His historical work had strong bibliographical and cartographical elements. He was an authority on the early history of North America and was elec ...
, (1831–1897), 18th century * Carter G. Woodson, (1875–1950) black history


Historians born in the 20th century

* Gar Alperovitz, (born 1936), Cold War * Stephen Ambrose, (1936–2002), WW2, U.S. political *
Joyce Appleby Joyce Oldham Appleby (April 9, 1929 – December 23, 2016) was an American historian. She was a professor of history at UCLA. She was president of the Organization of American Historians (1991) and the American Historical Association (1997). Lif ...
(1929–2016), capitalism, early national *
Herbert Aptheker Herbert Aptheker (July 31, 1915 – March 17, 2003) was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields of African-American history and general U.S. history, most notably, ''American Negro ...
, (1915–2003), African American *
Leonard J. Arrington Leonard James Arrington (July 2, 1917 – February 11, 1999) was an American author, academic and the founder of the Mormon History Association. He is known as the "Dean of Mormon History" and "the Father of Mormon History" because of his man ...
, (1917–1999), Mormons *
Thomas A. Bailey Thomas Andrew Bailey (December 14, 1902 – July 26, 1983) was a professor of history at his alma mater, Stanford University, and wrote many historical monographs on diplomatic history, including the widely used American history textbook, ''Th ...
, (1902–1983), diplomacy *
Bernard Bailyn Bernard Bailyn (September 10, 1922 – August 7, 2020) was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Pri ...
, (born 1922), colonial; Atlantic history *
K. Jack Bauer Karl Jack Bauer (born 30 July 1926 in Springfield, Ohio – died 17 September 1987 in Troy, New York), was one of the founders of the North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH) and a well-known naval historian. NASOH's K. Jack Bauer Award ...
, (1926–1987), U.S. naval, military, and maritime * Michael Beschloss, (born 1955), Cold War *
Ray Allen Billington Ray Allen Billington (September 28, 1903 in Bay City, Michigan - March 7, 1981 in San Marino, California) was an American historian focusing his work on the history of the American frontier and the American West, becoming one of the leading defend ...
, (1903–81), Frontier and West *
David Blight David William Blight (born 1949) is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previous ...
, (born 1949), slavery *
John Morton Blum John Morton Blum (; April 29, 1921 – October 17, 2011) was an American historian, active from 1948 to 1991. He was a specialist in 20th-century American political history, and was a senior advisor to Yale officials. Life and career Blum was bo ...
, (1921–2011), presidents *
Daniel J. Boorstin Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004) was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history. He was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in ...
, (1914–2004), legal, social *
Paul S. Boyer Paul Samuel Boyer (August 2, 1935–March 17, 2012Brooks, S."Paul Boyer, influential scholar of religious history, dies" ''The Daily Cardinal'', Mar 26, 2012.Vitello, PaulPaul S. Boyer, 78, Dies; Historian Studied A-Bomb and Witches ''New York Times ...
, (1935–2012), culture *
Alan Brinkley Alan Brinkley (June 2, 1949 – June 16, 2019) was an American political historian who taught for over 20 years at Columbia University. He was the Allan Nevins Professor of History until his death. From 2003 to 2009, he was University Provost. ...
, (1949–2019), 20th century * David Brody, (born 1930), labor *
James MacGregor Burns James MacGregor Burns (August 3, 1918 – July 15, 2014) was an American historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams Col ...
, (1918–2014), World War II, FDR * Richard Bushman, (born 1931), colonial, Mormons *
Jon Butler Jon Butler (born June 4, 1940) is a historian and Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University. He earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota, and is know ...
, (born 1940), religion, colonial *
Richard Carwardine Richard John Carwardine (born 12 January 1947) is a Welsh historian and academic. He specialises in American politics and religion in the era of the American Civil War. The professor is best known for his work on President Abraham Lincoln an ...
, (born 1947) political, religious; Lincoln * Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., (1918–2007), business * Ron Chernow, (born 1949), biography, business *
Edward M. Coffman Edward M. Coffman (January 27, 1929 – September 16, 2020) was a military historian and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus. Early life He was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and earned his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Kent ...
, (1929–2020), military *
Henry Steele Commager Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) was an American historian. As one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, with 40 books and 700 essays and reviews, he helped define modern liberalism in the United States. In the 19 ...
, (1902–98), intellectual *
John Milton Cooper John Milton Cooper Jr. (born 1940) is an American historian, author, and educator. He specializes in late 19th and early 20th-century American political and diplomatic history with a particular focus on presidential history. His 2009 biography of W ...
(born 1940), Woodrow Wilson *
Lawrence A. Cremin Lawrence Arthur Cremin (October 31, 1925 – September 4, 1990) was an educational historian and administrator. Biography Cremin attended Townsend Harris High School in Queens, and then received his B.A. and M.A. from City College of New York. ...
, (1925–90), education * William Cronon, (born 1954), environmental *
Robert Dallek Robert A. Dallek (born May 16, 1934) is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston ...
, (born 1934), politics, diplomacy *
David B. Danbom David B. Danbom (born 1947) is a historian, author, and was a professor of agricultural history at North Dakota State University, for more than forty years. Danbom spent nine years on the Fargo Historic Preservation Commission. Danbom also serve ...
(born 1947), rural * David Brion Davis, (1927–2019), Slavery *
Kenneth S. Davis Kenneth Sydney Davis (September 29, 1912 – June 10, 1999) was an American historian and university professor, most renowned for his series of biographies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Davis also wrote biographies of Charles Lindbergh, ...
, (1912–1999), Franklin D. Roosevelt *
Carl N. Degler Carl Neumann Degler (February 6, 1921 – December 27, 2014) was an American historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He was the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University. Early life and education Degler w ...
, (1921–2014), social * David Herbert Donald, (1920–2009), Civil War *
A. Hunter Dupree Anderson Hunter Dupree (29 January 1921 – 30 November 2019) was an American historian and one of the pioneer historians of the history of science and technology in the United States. He died in November 2019 at the age of 98. Early education T ...
, (1921–2019), science and technology *
Stanley Elkins Stanley Maurice Elkins (April 27, 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts – September 16, 2013 in Leeds, Massachusetts) was an American historian, best known for his unique and controversial comparison of slavery in the United States to Nazi concentrat ...
, (1925–2013), slavery, federalism *
Joseph J. Ellis Joseph John-Michael Ellis III (born July 18, 1943) is an American historian whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America. '' American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson'' won a National Boo ...
, (born 1943), early Republic * Niall Ferguson, (born 1964), military, business, economic, imperial *
David Hackett Fischer David Hackett Fischer (born December 2, 1935) is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Fischer's major works have covered topics ranging from large macroeconomic and cultural trends (''Albion's Seed,'' ''The Great Wave ( ...
, (born 1935) American Revolution, cycles * Robert Fogel, (1926–2013), economic, cliometrics, slavery * Eric Foner, (born 1943), Reconstruction * Shelby Foote, (1916–2005), Civil War * Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, (1941–2007), South; cultural & social, women * John Hope Franklin, (1915–2009), black history *
Frank Freidel Frank Burt Freidel, Jr. (May 22, 1916 – January 25, 1993) was an American historian, the first major biographer of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and one of the first scholars to work on his papers stored in the Roosevelt Library ...
, (1916–1993), Franklin Roosevelt *
John Lewis Gaddis John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941) is an American international relations scholar, military historian, and writer. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War an ...
, (born 1941), Cold War *
Lloyd Gardner Lloyd C. Gardner (born 1934) is an American historian, a member of the " Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history along with Walter LaFeber and Thomas J. McCormick. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Gardner was the Charles ...
(born 1934), diplomatic *
John Garraty John Arthur Garraty (July 4, 1920 – December 19, 2007) was an American historian and biographer. He specialized largely in American political and economic history. Garraty earned an undergraduate degree at Brooklyn College in 1941 and complet ...
, (1920–2007), biography * Edwin Gaustad (1923–2011), religion in America * Eugene Genovese, (1930–2012), South, slavery, religion * Doris Kearns Goodwin, (born 1943), presidential * Paul Gottfried, (born 1941), conservatism, modern Europe *
Lillian Guerra Lillian Guerra is a Professor of Cuban and Caribbean history and the Director of the Cuba Program at the University of Florida. A widely published author and researcher, she is considered one of the leading Cuban history experts in the world. Ear ...
, Cuban and Latin American history * Arnold Hirsch, (born 1949), urban, New Orleans, modern * Richard Hofstadter, (1916–1970), political, historiography * Daniel Walker Howe, (born 1937), political, intellectual *
Kenneth T. Jackson Kenneth Terry Jackson (born 1939) is a professor emeritus of history and social sciences at Columbia University. A frequent television guest, he is best known as an urban historian and a preeminent authority on the history of New York City, where ...
, (born 1939), urban, New York City * Merrill Jensen (1905–1980), American Revolution *
Michael Kazin Michael Kazin (born June 6, 1948) is an American historian, and professor at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of ''Dissent'' magazine. Early life Kazin was born in New York City in 1948 and was raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He is the so ...
, (born 1948), political *
George F. Kennan George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histo ...
, (1904–2005), U.S. and Russia * David Kennedy (born 1941), 20th century * Daniel J. Kevles, (born 1939), science * Walter LaFeber (born 1933), diplomatic * Robert Leckie, (1920–2001), American military * William Leuchtenburg (born 1922), American political and legal * Leon F. Litwack (born 1929), African-American * Walter Lord (1917–2002), American, popular *
George Marsden George Mish Marsden (born 1939) is an American historian who has written extensively on the interaction between Christianity and American culture, particularly on Christianity in American higher education and on American evangelicalism. He is be ...
, (born 1939), Christianity and American culture; Evangelicalism * Forrest McDonald, (1927–2016), early national, presidency, business *
Pauline Maier Pauline Alice Maier (née Rubbelke; April 27, 1938 – August 12, 2013) was a revisionist historian of the American Revolution, whose work also addressed the late colonial period and the history of the United States after the end of the Revolut ...
, (1938–2013), American revolution *
William Manchester William Raymond Manchester (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) was an American author, biographer, and historian. He was the author of 18 books which have been translated into over 20 languages. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the ...
, (1922–2004), World War II * David McCullough, (born 1933), presidents *
William S. McFeely William Shield McFeely (September 25, 1930 – December 11, 2019) was an American historian known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as his contributions to a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, and f ...
, (1930–2019), Civil War and Reconstruction * James M. McPherson, (born 1936), Civil War *
D. W. Meinig Donald William Meinig (November 1, 1924 – June 13, 2020) was an American geographer. He was Maxwell Research Professor Emeritus of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Career Meinig studied fo ...
(born 1924), American geography *
Russell Menard Russell Menard, Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota specializes in the economic and social history of the British colonies in North America. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 1975. Most of his work has been on the econo ...
, Colonial, demographic *
Perry Miller Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller (February 25, 1905 – December 9, 1963) was an American intellectual historian and a co-founder of the field of American Studies. Miller specialized in the history of early America, and took an active role in a revis ...
, (1905–1963), intellectual * Edmund Morgan (1916–2013), colonial and Revolution *
David Nasaw David Nasaw (born July 18, 1945) is an American author, biographer and historian who specializes in the cultural, social and business history of early 20th Century America. Nasaw is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of ...
(born 1945), Progressive Era *
George H. Nash George H. Nash (born April 1, 1945) is an American historian and interpreter of American conservatism. He is a biographer of Herbert Hoover. He is best known for ''The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945'', which first appeare ...
, (born 1945), conservatism; Herbert Hoover *
Mark A. Noll Mark Allan Noll (born 1946) is an American historian specializing in the history of Christianity in the United States. He holds the position of Research Professor of History at Regent College, having previously been Francis A. McAnaney Professor ...
, (born 1946), Christianity in the United States * James T. Patterson (born 1935), 20th-century political * Bradford Perkins (1925–2008), U.S. diplomatic * Gordon W. Prange (1910–1980), World War II *
Jack N. Rakove Jack Norman Rakove (born June 4, 1947) is an American historian, author and professor at Stanford University. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Biography Rakove was born in Chicago to Political Science Professor Milton L. Rakove (1918–1983) an ...
(born 1947), US Constitution and early politics *
Robert V. Remini Robert Vincent Remini (July 17, 1921 – March 28, 2013) was an American historian and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He wrote numerous books about President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian era, most notably a th ...
, (1921–2013), ante-bellum politics * Richard Rhodes (born 1937), nuclear weapons *
W.J. Rorabaugh William Joseph Rorabaugh (1945–2020) was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of Washington, and from 2003–08 he was the managing editor of ''Pacific Northwest Quarterly''. Life He graduated from Stanford U ...
(born 1945), 19th and 20th century and frontier *
Charles E. Rosenberg Charles Ernest Rosenberg (born 1936) is an American historian of medicine. He is Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University. Early life and education Rosenb ...
(born 1936), medicine and science *
Leila J. Rupp Leila J. Rupp (born 1950) is a historian, feminist, and professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an alumna of Bryn Mawr College, a member of the Seven Sisters (colleges), Seven Sisters women's colleges, ...
(born 1950), feminism * Cornelius Ryan, (1920–1974), World War II, popular *
Thomas J. Sugrue Thomas J. Sugrue (born 1962, Detroit, Michigan) is an American historian of the 20th-century United States at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvani ...
, (born 1962), urban *
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (; born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a spe ...
(1917–2007), Andrew Jackson, New Deal, Kennedys, politics *
Kathryn Kish Sklar Kathryn (Kitty) Kish Sklar (born December 1939) is an American historian, author, and professor. Her work focuses on the history of women's participation in social movements, voluntary organizations, and American public culture. Life and career ...
, (born 1939), Women's History of the United States * Theda Skocpol (born 1947), Institutions and comparative method; sociological *
Richard Slotkin Richard Sidney Slotkin (born November 8, 1942) is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and, since 2010, a member of the American A ...
(born 1942), environment & West; literature *
Henry Nash Smith Henry Nash Smith (September 29, 1906 – June 6, 1986) was a scholar of American culture and literature. He was co-founder of the academic discipline "American studies". He was also a noted Mark Twain scholar, and the curator of the Mark Twain P ...
, (1906–96), cultural, American Studies * Jean Edward Smith, (1932–2019), biography, * Richard Norton Smith, (born 1953) presidential *
Kenneth Stampp Kenneth Milton Stampp (12 July 191210 July 2009), Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (1946–1983), was a celebrated historian of slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstr ...
, (1912–2009), South, slavery *
Ronald Takaki Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki (April 12, 1939 – May 26, 2009) was an American academic, historian, ethnographer and author. Born in pre-statehood Hawaii, Takaki studied at the College of Wooster and completed his doctorate in American history at t ...
, (1939–2009), ethnic studies *
Stephan Thernstrom Stephan Thernstrom (born November 5, 1934) is an American academic and historian who is the Winthrop Research Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University. He is a specialist in ethnic and social history and was the editor of the ''Harvard ...
, (born 1934), new social history *
George Tindall George Brown Tindall (February 26, 1921 – December 2, 2006) was an American historian and author. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1958 until his retirement, Tindall was "one of the nation's pre-eminent histo ...
, (1921–2006), South *
John Toland John Toland (30 November 167011 March 1722) was an Irish people, Irish rationalist philosopher and freethought, freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, whi ...
, (1912–2004), world wars *
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (born July 11, 1938) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian specializing in early America and the history of women, and a professor at Harvard University. Her approach to history has been described as a tribute to ...
, (born 1938), Early America *
Robert M. Utley Robert Marshall Utley (October 31, 1929 – June 7, 2022) was an American author and historian who wrote sixteen books on the history of the American West. He was a chief historian for the National Park Service. Much of his writing deals with t ...
, (born 1929), 19th-century American West *
J. Samuel Walker J. Samuel Walker is an American historian and author based in Maryland, most notable for his research and writing on the nuclear age, both weaponry and atomic energy. Several of his books have earned broad-based critical acclaim and advanced nove ...
, nuclear energy and weapons * Russell Weigley, (1930–2004), military * Richard White, (born 1947), American West, environmental, Native American * Sean Wilentz, (born 1951), political, cultural * William Appleman Williams, (1921–1990) diplomatic *
Clyde N. Wilson Clyde Norman Wilson (born 11 June 1941) is a retired American professor of history at the University of South Carolina, a paleoconservative political commentator, a long-time contributing editor for ''Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture ...
, (born 1941), 19th-century South * Gordon S. Wood, (born 1933), American Revolution *
C. Vann Woodward Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 – December 17, 1999) was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of un ...
, (1908–1999), South * Howard Zinn, (1922–2010), People's history *
Anthony J. Cade II Anthony or Antony is a masculine given name, derived from the '' Antonii'', a ''gens'' ( Roman family name) to which Mark Antony (''Marcus Antonius'') belonged. According to Plutarch, the Antonii gens were Heracleidae, being descendants of Anton ...
, (born 1988), American Military History


American historians working in U.S. on non-U.S. topics

Research and teaching history in the United States has, of course, included the history of Europe and the rest of the world as well. So many topics are covered that is possible only to list some of the outstanding scholars. *
Carl L. Becker Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 – April 10, 1945) was an American historian of the Age of Enlightenment in America and Europe. Life He was born in Waterloo, Iowa. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1893 as an undergraduate, an ...
, (1873–1945), modern Europe *
Elizabeth A. R. Brown Elizabeth Atkinson Rash Brown (born February 16, 1932) is a professor emerita of history at Brooklyn College, of the City University of New York, a scholar and published author, known for her writings on feudalism. She received her B.A. from S ...
, (born 1932), medieval * Geoffrey Bruun (1899–1988), European civilization *
Louis R. Gottschalk Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk (February 21, 1899 in Brooklyn – June 23, 1975 in Chicago.) was an American historian, an expert on Lafayette and the French Revolution. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, where he was the Gustav ...
, (1899–1975) French Revolution * Clarence H. Haring, (1885–1960), Latin American *
Charles H. Haskins Charles Homer Haskins (December 21, 1870 – May 14, 1937) was a history professor at Harvard University. He was an American historian of the Middle Ages, and advisor to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He is widely recognized as the first academic ...
, (1870–1937), medieval * Alfred Thayer Mahan, (1840–1914), naval * Lawrence Henry Gipson, (1882–1970), British Empire before 1775 *
William L. Langer William Leonard Langer (March 16, 1896 – December 26, 1977) was an American historian, intelligence analyst and policy advisor. He served as chairman of the history department at Harvard University. He was on leave during World War II as h ...
, (1896–1977), European diplomatic * John Lothrop Motley, (1814–1877), Netherlands * Lewis Mumford, (1895–1988), urban *
William H. Prescott William Hickling Prescott (May 4, 1796 – January 28, 1859) was an American historian and Hispanist, who is widely recognized by historiographers to have been the first American scientific historian. Despite having serious visual impairm ...
(1796–1859), Spain * Jacques Barzun, (1907–2012), cultural *
John Boswell John Eastburn Boswell (March 20, 1947December 24, 1994) was an American historian and a full professor at Yale University. Many of Boswell's studies focused on the issue of religion and homosexuality, specifically Christianity and homosexuality. ...
, (1947–1994), Medieval * Peter Brown, (born 1935) Medieval *
Christopher Browning Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian who is the professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting ...
, (born 1944) the Holocaust *
Gordon A. Craig Gordon Alexander Craig (November 13, 1913 – October 30, 2005) was a Scottish-American liberal historian of German history and of diplomatic history. Early life Craig was born in Glasgow. In 1925 he emigrated with his family to Toronto, Onta ...
, (1913–2005) German, diplomatic * Robert Darnton, (born 1939) 18th-century France * Lucy Dawidowicz, (1915–1990) the Holocaust *
Natalie Zemon Davis Natalie Zemon Davis, (born November 8, 1928) is a Canadian and American historian of the early modern period. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in C ...
, (born 1928) early modern France, film *
Trevor Dupuy Trevor Nevitt Dupuy (May 3, 1916 – June 5, 1995) was a colonel in the United States Army and a noted military historian. Early life Born in Staten Island, New York, the son of accomplished illustrator and artist, Laura Nevitt Dupuy, and noted ...
, (1916–1995) military *
John K. Fairbank John King Fairbank (May 24, 1907 – September 14, 1991) was an American historian of China and United States–China relations. He taught at Harvard University from 1936 until his retirement in 1977. He is credited with building the field of Ch ...
, (1907–1991), China *
Saul Friedländer Saul Friedländer (; born October 11, 1932) is a Czech-Jewish-born historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA. Biography Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews. He was raised in France and lived thro ...
, (born 1932) Holocaust * Francis Fukuyama, (born 1955) world *
Peter Gay Peter Joachim Gay (né Fröhlich; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Sch ...
(1923–2015), psychohistory, Enlightenment, modern Europe *
Alfred Gollin Alfred M. Gollin (February 6, 1926 – October 30, 2005) was an American scholar of European history. Early life and education Born on February 6, 1926, in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Gollin enlisted in the US Army in 1943 ...
(1926–2005), 20th-century Europe *
John Hattendorf John Brewster Hattendorf, D.Phil., D.Litt., L.H.D., FRHistS, FSNR, (born December 22, 1941) is an American naval historian. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than fifty books, mainly on British and American maritime hi ...
, (born 1941) maritime and naval * John Whitney Hall, (1916–1997) Japan * Victor Davis Hanson, (born 1953) ancient warfare * Gertrude Himmelfarb, (1922–2019) 19th-century British *
Hajo Holborn Hajo Holborn (18 May 1902, Berlin – 20 June 1969, Bonn) was a German-American historian and specialist in modern German history. Early life Hajo Holborn was born the son of Ludwig Holborn, the German physicist and "Direktor der Physikalis ...
, (1902–1969), Germany * Tony Judt, (1948–2010), 20th-century Europe * Donald Kagan, (1932–2021) ancient Greek * Paul Kennedy, (born 1945) world, military * Claudia Koonz (born 1940), Nazi Germany * Thomas Kuhn, (1922–1996), science * John Lukacs, (1924–2019) 20th-century Europe * Ramsay MacMullen, (born 1928) Roman *
Charles S. Maier Charles S. Maier (born February 23, 1939, in New York City) is the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. He teaches European and international history at Harvard. Biography Maier served as the director of th ...
, (born 1939) 20th century * William McNeill, (1917–2016) World * Arno J. Mayer (born 1926), World War I and Europe *
George Mosse Gerhard "George" Lachmann Mosse (September 20, 1918 – January 22, 1999) was an American historian, who emigrated from Nazi Germany first to Great Britain and then to the United States. He was professor of history at the University of Iowa, the ...
(1918–1999), German, Jewish, fascism * Geoffrey Parker (born 1943), early modern military *
Richard Pipes Richard Edgar Pipes ( yi, ריכארד פּיִפּעץ ''Rikhard Pipets'', the surname literally means 'beak'; pl, Ryszard Pipes; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was an American academic who specialized in Russian and Soviet history. He publish ...
(1923–2018), Russian *
J. G. A. Pocock John Greville Agard Pocock (; born 7 March 1924) is a historian of political thought from New Zealand. He is especially known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period (mostly in Europe, Britain, and America), his work on th ...
(born 1924), early modern Europe *
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky (December 21, 1923 – May 14, 2011) was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of numerous books on Russian history and European intellectual history. Biography Nicolai Valentinovitch R ...
(1923–2011), Russian * Theodore Ropp (1911–2000), military *
Carl Schorske Carl Emil Schorske (March 15, 1915 – September 13, 2015), known professionally as Carl E. Schorske, was an American cultural historian and professor emeritus at Princeton University. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for ...
(1915–2015), European intellectual *
Paul W. Schroeder Paul W. Schroeder (February 23, 1927''International Who's Who 2000'', Vol. 63 (Europa, 1999: ), p. 1391. – December 6, 2020) was an American historian who was professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. He specialized in European interna ...
(born 1927), European diplomacy * Joan Scott, (born 1941) Feminism *
James J. Sheehan James J. Sheehan (born 1937) is an American historian of modern Germany and the former president of the American Historical Association (2005). Biography Born in San Francisco in 1937, Sheehan earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1958 and ...
(born 1937), modern German *
Dennis Showalter Dennis Edwin Showalter (February 12, 1942 – December 30, 2019) was a professor emeritus of history at Colorado College. Showalter specialized in German military history. He was president of the American Society for Military History from 1997 to ...
(1942–2019), military *
Timothy D. Snyder Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute fo ...
(born 1969), World War II *
Jonathan Spence Jonathan Dermot Spence (11 August 1936 – 25 December 2021) was an English-born American historian, sinologist, and writer who specialized in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. His ...
, (born 1936), China *
Jackson J. Spielvogel Jackson Joseph Spielvogel is Associate Professor Emeritus of History at Pennsylvania State University. His textbooks on world history, Western civilization and Nazi Germany are widely adopted in middle school, high school, and college history course ...
, (born 1939), world *
Robert C. Tucker Robert Charles Tucker (May 29, 1918 – July 29, 2010) was an American political scientist and historian. Tucker is best remembered as a biographer of Joseph Stalin and as an analyst of the Soviet political system, which he saw as dynamic rather ...
, (1918–2010) Stalin * Eugen Weber (1925–2007), modern French * Gerhard Weinberg (born 1928), World War II * John B. Wolf, (1907–1996) early modern French * Gordon Wright, (1912–2000) Modern French


Notes and references


Further reading

* Amico, Eleanor, ed. ''Reader's Guide to Women's Studies'' (1997) 762pp; advanced guide to scholarship on 200+ topics * Beisner, Robert L., ed. '' American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature'' (2 vol 2003) 2070pp; annotated guide to 16,000 books and articles, covering all major topics; each of 31 topical sections is introduced and edited by an expert. * Cunliffe, Marcus, and Robin Winks, eds. ''Pastmasters: Some Essays on Americans Historians'' (1969) essays on leading historians of the past (by current historians) * Dayton, Cornelia H.; Levenstein, Lisa. "The Big Tent of U.S. Women's and Gender History: A State of the Field," ''Journal of American History'' (2012) 99#3 pp 793–817 * Foner, Eric, ed. ''The New American History'' (1997) 397pp; 16 essays by experts on recent historiography * Foner, Eric, and Lisa McGirr, eds. ''American History Now'' (2011) 440pp; essays by 18 scholars on recent historiograph
excerpt and text search
* Garraty, John A., and Eric Foner, eds. ''The Reader's Companion to American History'' (2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) * Handlin, Oscar, et al. ''Harvard Guide to American history'' (1955), methodology and detailed bibliographies * Higham, John. ''History: Professional Scholarship in America'' (1989). , the history of the profession *
Jensen, Richard J. Richard Joseph Jensen (born October 24, 1941) is an American historian, who was professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, from 1973 to 1996. He has worked on American political, social, military, and economic history as well as ...
"Historiography of American Political History," in Jack Greene, ed., ''Encyclopedia of American Political History'' (New York: Scribner's, 1984), vol 1. pp 1–25 * Joranger, Terje Mikael Hasle. "A Historiographical Perspective on the Social History of Immigration to and Ethnicity in the United States," ''Swedish-American Historical Quarterly'' (2009) 60#1 pp 5–24. * Kammen, Michael G, ed. ''The Past before us: Contemporary historical writing in the United States'' (1980), wide-ranging survey by leading scholars
online free
* Kimball, Jeffrey. "The Influence of Ideology on Interpretive Disagreement: A Report on a Survey of Diplomatic, Military and Peace Historians on the Causes of 20th Century U. S. Wars," ''History Teacher'' 17#3 (1984) pp. 355–384 DOI: 10.2307/493146
online
* Kirkendall, Richard S., ed. ''The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History'' (2011), essays on the history of the OAH, and on teaching main themes * Kraus, Michael, and Davis D. Joyce. ''The Writing of American History'' (3rd ed. 1990) * Kulikoff, Allan. "A Modest Proposal to Resolve the Crisis in History" ''Journal of the Historical Society'' (June 2011) 11#2 pp 239–263, on the tension between social history and cultural history * Link, Arthur, and Rembert Patrick, eds. ''Writing Southern History'' (1966) 502 pp; scholarly essays on historiography of the chief topics * Muccigrosso, Robert ed. ''Research Guide to American Historical Biography'' (5 vol 1988–91); 3600 pages of historiography on 452 prominent Americans * Novick, Peter. ''That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession'' (1988), * Parish, Peter J., ed. ''Reader's Guide to American History'' (1997), historiographical overview of 600 topics and scholars * Rutland, Robert, ed. ''Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945–2000'' (University of Missouri Press, 2000
online
* Samuel, Lawrence R. ''Remembering America: How We Have Told Our Past'' (2015) covers historians 1920–201
excerpt
* Singal, Daniel Joseph. "Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography." ''American Historical Review'' 89.4 (1984): 976–1004
online
* Wish, Harvey. ''The American Historian: A Social-intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past'' (Oxford University Press, 1960
online
* Zelikow, Philip, Niall Ferguson, Francis J. Gavin, Anne Karalekas, and Daniel Sargent. "Forum 31 on the Importance of the Scholarship of Ernest May" ''H-DIPLO'' Dec. 17, 202
online
{{historiography American historians