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

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

. He was born in

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

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

Life

He graduated from the

City College of New York The City College of the City University of New York (also known as the City College of New York, or simply City College or CCNY) is a public university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, Cit ...

in 1955, and from Columbia University, with a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962, where he studied under

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

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

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

, from 1963 to 1994. After retiring from Berkeley, he taught at

George Mason University George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was origi ...

from 1994 to 2005. He participated in civil rights sit-ins at Berkeley and in the South, and the

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

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

Awards and honors

Levine was a

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

in 1983, elected to the

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

in 1985 and
Fulbright Scholar
in History from th
University of California - Berkeley
to th
University of Sydney
in 1988. He was president of the

Organization of American Historians 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 ...

in 1992–93 and received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1994. An award in his name is given by the Organization of American Historians.

Works

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

References

External links

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