What They're Famous For

David Herbert Donald is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and of American Civilization Emeritus at Harvard University. A student of the famed Lincoln and Civil War scholar James Garfield Randall, Donald has trained many of today's leading historians, and ranks as one of America's leading authorities on the Civil War era. He is the author of Lincoln (1995), which won the prestigious Lincoln Prize and was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Lincoln is considered the definitive one volume biography for our time. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960), and for Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987). Donald has been invited to the White House by almost every president from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, giving lectures or attending receptions.

Professor Donald is considered the leading authority on Abraham Lincoln and has advised on numerous projects relating to the 16th President. He was the principal historical adviser and commentator for the 1992 documentary series"Lincoln" and for the 2000 television series"A House Divided: Abraham and Mary Lincoln." Additionally he served as a historical consultant for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum. Donald has moved on from studying Lincoln, and is embarking on writing a biography of John Quincy Adams. As he recently stated in an interview for the Boston Globe:"I've said farewell to Lincoln so many times, but this time I think it will really happen. I'll miss writing about Lincoln, but on the other hand, I've sort of been there, done that. Perhaps I was getting repetitious anyway."

Personal Anecdote

In 1947 I received my first teaching appointment. It was at Columbia University in the School of General Studies, where most of the students were veterans whose education had been interrupted by World War II. Many were much older than I, and all knew much more of the world than I, who grew up on a farm in Mississippi. I felt lucky if I could keep one day ahead of my students, and I lived in constant fear that I would be exposed as an ignoramus. I tried to compensate by working very hard on my lectures, ransacking the Columbia libraries and staying up night after night till long past midnight.

Toward the end of the first semester our syllabus called for a lecture on the celebrated Scopes trial (1925), where Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan fiercely argued opposing sides in their debate over evolution. I had read biographies of both men, as well as several accounts of the trial itself, and I tried to present, as fairly as I could, their arguments as well as the rulings of the judge. I thought I was doing a pretty good job when a middle-aged man in the back row raised his hand and said in a gruff voice,"Well, Dr. Donald, that's all well and good, but it isn't really the way things happened." His name was McEvoy, and he had been a reporter for one of the New York papers at the trial. Speaking without interruption for about ten minutes, he proceeded to give us a first-hand account of what went on in that court room.

Initially taken aback, I looked around the classroom and saw that the other students were following Mr. McEvoy avidly, and when he had finished his account, they began peppering him with questions about the trial. Presently they turned to me to learn what I thought its significance was. The discussion continued long after the class bell rang, as the students and I walked across the campus, arguing about the meaning of Darwinism. For the first time I began to realize that this was what education is supposed to be--a reciprocal process in which one both teaches and learns.

That is a lesson I have kept with me ever since. On whatever level I have taught, whether a freshman seminar or a graduate course, I have found that I can best teach students if I also am willing to learn from them. Whether my courses were offered at Columbia, Princeton, Smith, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, or Harvard, my students and I have worked together in this joint enterprise of learning. That is why I loved teaching. And that is why, I think, so many of my former students have gone on to achieve great distinction in their chosen fields.

Quotes

By David Herbert Donald

The Lincolns' celebration were short-lived. Shortly before the party their son Willie had fallen ill with"bilious fever" - probably typhoid fever, caused by pollution in the White House water system. Deeply anxious, his parents considered canceling the grand reception, but the family doctor assured them that the boy was in no immediate danger. Even so, both the President and his wife quietly slipped upstairs during the party to be at their son's bedside. During the next two weeks Tad came down with the same illness while Willie grew worse and worse.

Sitting up with his sick children night after night, Lincoln was unable to transact business, and he seemed to stumble through his duties. There were fluctuations in Willie's illness, but during the two weeks after the grand party he grew weaker and weaker, and Lincoln began to despair of his recovery. On February 20 the end came. Stepping into his office, Lincoln said in a voice chocked with emotion:"Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone-he is actually gone!" Then he burst into tears and left to give what comfort he could to Tad.

Both parents were devastated by grief. When Lincoln looked on the face of his dead son, he could only say brokenly,"He was too good for this earth...but then we loved him so." It seemed appropriate that Willie's funeral, which was held in the White House, was accompanied by one of the heaviest wind and rain storms ever to visit Washington. Long after the burial the President repeatedly shut himself in a room so that he could weep alone. At nights he had happy dreams of being with Willie, only to wake to the sad recognition of death. On a trip to Fort Monroe, long after Willie was buried, Lincoln read passages from Macbeth and King Lear to an aide, and then from King John he recited Constances lament for her son:

And, father cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again.

His voice trembled, and he wept. -- David Herbert Donald in"Lincoln"

About David Herbert Donald

Basic Facts

Teaching Positions:

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Charles Warren Professor of American History, 1973-91, chair of graduate program in American civilization, 1979-85, professor emeritus, 1991--.
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, professor of history, 1962-73, Harry C. Black Professor of American History, 1963-73, director of the Institute of Southern History, 1966-72.
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor of history, 1959-62.
Smith College, Northampton, MA, associate professor of history, 1949-51.
Columbia University, New York, NY, instructor, 1947-49, assistant professor, 1951-52, associate professor, 1952-57, professor of history, 1957-59.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, research assistant, 1943-46; research associate, 1946-47.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, teaching fellow, 1942.

Visiting associate professor of history, Amherst College, 1950; Fulbright lecturer in American history, University College of North Wales, 1953-54; member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, 1957-58; Harmsworth Professor of American History, Oxford University, 1959-60; John P. Young lecturer, Memphis State University, 1963; Walter Lynwood Fleming lecturer, Louisiana State University, 1965; visiting professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1969-70; Benjamin Rush Lecturer, American Psychiatric Association, 1972; Commonwealth Lecturer, University College, University of London, 1975; Samuel Paley lecturer, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, 1991.

Area of Research: 19th Century US History, Civil War Era, Abraham Lincoln.

Education: Holmes Junior College, Millsaps College, 1941; M.A., Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1942, 1946.

Major Publications:

Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:

Awards:

David Herbert Donald Prize for"Excellence in Lincoln Studies," Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, 2005.
Pulitzer Prize in biography, 1961, for Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, and 1988, for Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe; Guggenheim fellowship, 1964-65, and 1985-86.
Lincoln was winner of the 1996 Lincoln Prize, the Lincoln/Barondess Award from the Civil War Round Table of New York, the Christopher Award, a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for nonfiction, the American Library Association for distinguished nonfiction, the New England Booksellers award for the best nonfiction book of the year, and the Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy. (all in 1996)
Honorary M.A. degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University, a L.H.D. degree from Millsaps College (1976), the degree of Litt.D. from the College of Charleston, South Carolina (1985), the Doctor of History degree from Lincoln University, L.H.D. degree from the University of Calgary (2001), and the L.H.D. degree from Illinois College (2002) . In 1989 he was the recipient of the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 1992 he received the L.H.D. degree from that university. In May 2003 received the L.H.D. degree from Middlebury College.
Mr. Donald has held two fellowships from the John Si Nevins/Freeman Award, Chicago Civil War Roundtable, 1999.
Benjamin L. C. Wailes Award, Mississippi Historical Society, 1994.
C. Hugh Holman Prize, Modern Language Association, 1988.
National Endowment for the Humanities senior fellow, 1971-72.
American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, 1969-70.
George A. and Eliza G. Howard Fellowship, 1957-58.
Social Science Research Council fellowship, 1945-46.

Additional Info:

Donald served the American Historical Association on the Committee on the Harmsworth Professorship, the Committee on Research Needs of the Profession, the Nominating Committee, the Committee on the Albert J. Beveridge and Dunning Prizes, and the Board of Editors of The American Historical Review. He was in 1962-1964 an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Organization of American Historians, and in 1964 served on the Committee on the Future of the Association.
In the Southern Historical Association he has served on the Committee on Membership, the Committee on the Program, the Committee on Nominations, the Committee on the Ramsdell Award, and the Executive Council. In 1969 he was elected Vice President of the Southern Historical Association, and in 1970 he became the President of that group.
In 2001-2002 he was a member of the Smithsonian Institution's Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of the National Museum of American History.
In January 1990 President George Bush invited him to deliver the first lecture, on Abraham Lincoln, in the"Presidential Lectures on the Presidency" at the White House.
Donald was the principal historical adviser and commentator for the 1992 documentary series"Lincoln" and for the 2000 television series"A House Divided: Abraham and Mary Lincoln." He has made numerous television appearances, including; PBS'"Newshour with Jim Lehrer" and C-Span's"Booknotes," and has written articles for the popular media including the New York Times and Washington Post. Donald also served as a historical consultant for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum.

What They're Famous For

Kenneth Milton Stampp is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1946-1983. He is an award-winning historian of slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction, and is considered the leading scholar in his area.

Stampp was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1912, and came of age during the depression years. He attended the Milwaukee State Teachers' College, and then the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he graduated his B.A. in 1935 and his M.A. a year later in 1936. Stampp worked on his PhD under the direction of Charles A. Beard and William B. Hesseltine, who served as his dissertation advisor. Stampp completed his doctorate in 1942, and then briefly worked at the University of Arkansas and the University of Maryland from 1942 to 1946. In 1946, he began his tenure at Berkley where he taught for 37 years before retiring.

In 2006 Stamp celebrated the 60th anniversary of his affiliation with the UC, Berkley. His most well known publication is The Peculiar Institution, for which he is most remembered, and is"starting point for modern studies of US slavery." Stampp's next book The Era of Reconstruction countered the school of thought of William A. Dunning (1857-1922) and his followers, by claiming that Reconstruction was in fact a success, and as Stampp writes"the last great crusade of nineteenth-century romantic reformers." The book served to" cement" Stampp as the leading authority on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Stamp's many distinctions include being awarded the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction in 1989, and in 1993, the Lincoln Prize for lifetime achievement, which was given by the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. He has held visiting professorship posts at numerous institutions, including, Harvard University, University of London, University of Munich, and Oxford University.

Personal Anecdote

Master's Thesis on Antislavery in the South

I had no doubt after meeting Hesseltine that he was the man I wanted to work with. Well, he was the most dynamic American historian there. Perhaps not the most profound, but certainly the most dynamic. Hicks, by comparison, was rather drab. I always thought of him as the man in grey; his complexion was sort of grey, and he wore grey suits. There was a certain quiet charm about him, and I took courses from him in Western history and recent American history. But Hesseltine, the first course I took from him was American constitutional history, and he was a Beardian. One of the first things he had us read was Beard's economic interpretation of the constitution, and in those Marxist days, this made sense to me.Hesseltine bought it, and he sold it. I was convinced that this was a satisfactory explanation for the nature of the constitution and for the motives of its framers.

He had a wonderful lecture style. He was witty, he was clever, his lectures were full of humor. Challenging, sometimes outrageous generalizations. But I was rather young and naive then, and he seemed to me awfully exciting. There was no discussion in these lectures. He lectured, and we listened. For a while, I was scared to death of him. I thought he was wonderful, but I was afraid of him.

The next term, in the fall, I started taking his year course in the history of the old South and the sectional conflict and Civil War and Reconstruction, and that's what really excited me. He was a southerner himself; he came from Virginia, but he was a kind of southern maverick at the time. He always claimed that the men who ran the--and they were men at that time, mostly--the Southern Historical Association would have nothing to do with him. He was never elected president of the Southern Historical Association, and he claimed that it was because he was just too much of a rebel.

I loved graduate school, I really did. I look back with great nostalgia to Madison in the thirties. It was a wonderful place. I really did like graduate school and got to know people who were lifetime friends during those years.

I had to pick a thesis topic immediately when I started graduate work, and I picked as the subject of my master's thesis the antislavery movement in the South. That was my first experience with research into important primary sources. I picked it myself. I don't remember how--I must have read something about antislavery sentiment in the Old South. The Southern critics of slavery were largely Quakers; there were antislavery organizations in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee--not in the Deep South, where organized antislavery was impossible. Antislavery Southerners advocated gradual, compensated emancipation, and then the colonization of the emancipated slaves somewhere outside the United States, back to Africa or wherever. That was the kind of movement they supported.

Dissertation: Indiana Politics during the Civil War

I intended to keep working in that period and that field. Somehow, I got interested in an Indiana politician. I have no Indiana connections. Indiana is politically an interesting state, and I'll explain why. I got interested in an Indiana politician named Oliver P. Morton. He was a Democrat in his early life, and broke with the Democrats in 1854 over the Kansas-Nebraska bill. He joined a group that was at that time known as the Anti-Nebraska Democrats. They were one part of the coalition that formed the Republican party, old Whigs and Anti-Nebraska Democrats and antislavery Free-Soilers, some former members of the Know-Nothing party.

Morton was a fairly important, active politician during the 1850s, and in 1860, he ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket and was elected. Another Republican, [Henry S.] Lane, was elected governor. Everyone knew in advance that he was going to be elected to the United States Senate. He was, and Morton became governor in 1861.

My interest in Morton never changed, but I finally decided that I disliked the man so much that I couldn't possibly write a biography of him. That's an interesting matter.

The more I got to know him, the more I got to dislike the man, and that's an interesting thing to think about. Biographers usually write about people they like and not often about people they don't like. Perhaps there would be some interesting biographies if they were written by people who didn't like their subjects, like some of the Nixon biographies, for example.

By that time, I had done quite a lot of research on Morton as governor, as Civil War governor of Indiana.

Then the question was, if I don't want to do a biography of Morton, how do I salvage off-and-on research over a couple of years? I finally decided that I was going to do a more general study of Indiana politics during the Civil War. This turned out to be a fascinating subject because Indiana was a fascinating state during the Civil War.

I ended with the end of the war in my dissertation. I have an introductory chapter on the 1850s about the formation of the Republican party and the election of 1860; the second chapter is on the secession crisis; then the rest is on the war and the social consequences. I have a concluding chapter that tries to summarize my view of what had happened in society in Indiana during the war and to the politics of Indiana. That's where I ended it.

After I wrote the dissertation, I reworked it, did some cutting, and submitted it for publication.

My life that year was very simple: work. I worked in the Indiana State Library and the Indiana Historical Bureau. They were both in the same building, but they had different collections. In the evening at least five nights a week, I went to the Indiana Public Library and worked on newspapers for the 1850s and 1860s, and that's about all there was to my life. I knew my roommate, I got to know the people at the Indiana State Library, but I had virtually no social life while I was down there. It was just work. Sometimes my roommate and I played two-handed bridge at night just for diversion. I read when I could, but it was really just the library all day long.

I think I was kind of lonesome down there with not knowing anybody. I had had a rather active social life in Madison, and this was drudgery in some respects, but the research was exciting, I loved it.

I was out of graduate school as far as that was concerned. No, I had plenty of time just to work on my dissertation.

I had finished teaching up in Fond du Lac and the term ended in Madison. It was the same drudgery being a teaching assistant, making out the exams and grading the exams and attending lectures that I was hearing for the third time.

By the end of July or early August, I finally finished my research on that dissertation, and I thought it was time for a holiday. Jobs were almost nonexistent, so I was delighted to take the job at Arkansas. I could have had one more year on the extension; I could have had a second year.

In June 1941, we moved back down to Madison. Some time while I was up in Rhinelander, I had a letter from a young professor who used to teach at the University of Wisconsin, his name was Fred Harvey Harrington. He was a Ph.D. from New York University, and he was the young man in the History Department there, in American history. I got to know him fairly well the year that I was Hesseltine's teaching assistant and teaching in Fond du Lac. They came over to see Kay and me a number of times, and we went to see them.

The next year, the year I was in Rhinelander, he left Madison to go to the University of Arkansas to become head of the Department of History and Political Science as a full professor. Some time in the late spring of 1941, I heard from Hesseltine and got a letter from Harrington that there was a one-year job. Somebody was going on leave at the University of Arkansas, and Harrington wanted to offer it to me. I took it.

So in June we went back down to Madison, and we found an apartment. It was a terribly hot summer, I remember, and I spent the whole summer writing my dissertation. Before the summer was over, I had it all written except one concluding chapter. I showed it all to Hesseltine, and he approved it, thought it was good. I'm not very good in heat, especially humid heat, the kind we had in Wisconsin. I can remember sitting in a bathtub with a big board on the side, writing in the bathtub in cool water with my notes there.

By September, I had just one last chapter, about fifteen or twenty pages, I had to write, and early in September, we started for Fayetteville, Arkansas.

That fall--it's all connected with Pearl Harbor--I finished the last chapter of my dissertation, and I was to go back to Madison. Pearl Harbor was on the seventh, I think it was a Sunday, and I was to go back to Madison and take my Ph.D. exams the following Wednesday.

I took my oral exam on the tenth of December. That day I think their minds were on Pearl Harbor and other things more than my exam. They did ask some questions. I had my usual trouble with Chester Penn Higby, the European historian, who asked me some impossible questions. Selig Perlman, the man with whom I took my outside field in economics, labor history and socialism and capitalism, was on the committee. He thought my dissertation was excellent. I got by with everyone except Higby.

After it was over, I was sent out then called back in, and everyone congratulated me except Higby. He just walked out and never said a word to me. He could never forgive me for that, even though I had given him an explanation. I think I did very well in my oral exam. So I passed, and I was a Ph.D. at last.

An Offer from Berkeley

Then in the spring of 1946, things began to happen. Hofstadter got an offer from Columbia, and I knew he was leaving. Mills got an offer from Columbia, and I knew he was leaving. And there I was--I wasn't going to get the job at Hopkins, and I wasn't going to get the job at Swarthmore. I thought, My God, I'm going to be here again. Freidel is fired, Hofstadter is leaving, Mills is leaving, and I'm going to be here alone.

In April 1946 I went to a kind of rump meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in Bloomington, Indiana. John D. Hicks had been one of my professors at Wisconsin.

He was very much in favor of Roosevelt's foreign policy. He knew Hesseltine, and I was a Hesseltine student. John D. Hicks was at the Mississippi Valley meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. It was a small meeting, and I remember Hicks saying,"Let's have a drink together. You know, I'm an old Wisconsin--" he was out here [in Berkeley] now. He came out here in '42. So we sat and had a drink and talked about Wisconsin and about Hesseltine. And that was that.

The next month, early May of 1946, I got a letter from Hicks and a letter from Hesseltine offering me an instructorship out here. He had written to Hesseltine and said that he was interested in bringing me to Berkeley. I said,"Instructorship? I'm an associate professor. I know it's only Maryland, but I'm not going to start over again." He wrote to Hesseltine and said,"Tell Stampp to accept it," an instructorship. I said,"No." I wrote back and said,"I'll step down one rank. I'll go back to assistant professor, but I'm not going to take an instructorship." Well, I think Hicks had sort of said,"That's all I can do." Ultimately it was changed.

It was raised to an assistant professorship, and more than that, it was raised to a second-step assistant professorship. My salary at Maryland at that time was $3,500, and going to Berkeley, my salary would be $3,600. That wasn't much of an inducement. Well, it turned out when I got here that it was going to be $3,900, and that helped a lot.

I didn't even know where Berkeley was. I had to find a map. I thought Berkeley was somewhere in southern California. I was that ignorant about the university. I found it was across from San Francisco. I had never been to San Francisco. I had been to Los Angeles but not San Francisco. I told Hofstadter about the job, and he said,"Well, surely you're not going to take it." I said,"Well, I'd like to get out of here, and I wouldn't mind going out there for a few years." He said,"Well, I must say, I don't think much of the history department at Berkeley."

Well, he knew, for example, that the dominant figure for some years was Herbert Eugene Bolton and that Bolton didn't have any use for men who taught American history. You should teach history of the Americas.

I came out. I told Hofstadter I would go out at least for a few years. I went to Madison that summer and taught in the summer session. My wife was with me. Then I managed to get a car. They were hard to get in 1946, but through an influential brother-in-law I got a car so I could drive out.

We got into California on the twelfth of September, I remember, and stopped up in the mountains. I loved the mountains, I wanted to stop in the mountains, so we stopped in the little village of Cisco, elevation of about 5,500 feet, and found a motel there.

The next day, we drove on down-- driving into the Bay Area then was something because there was no freeway. You had to drive through Roseville and every community on the way--Davis, and right through Richmond, and Rodeo and so on. I thought we would never get here.

I remember we finally came out on--I think there was an East Bay freeway then--the freeway the afternoon of September thirteenth, and I looked at San Francisco and the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, and I fell in love with it, absolutely fell in love.

Settling into Teaching and Publishing

I began teaching a survey course in American history. I remember walking in to 101 Cal [California Hall]--I don't know whether you remember 101 Cal when it was a lecture hall, held about 400 students.

It was a nice lecture hall--you didn't realize the size of it from the podium because it was sort of like this [shaped like an amphitheater]. I had never lectured to more than thirty-five students, and I walked in there one Tuesday morning and found 400 students in there, and four teaching assistants whom I had not met yet. I still remember one of them asked whether I had my registration card with me. I looked kind of young then. I had to tell them I was going to run this course. And--wow, that was an experience, I must say, lecturing to that many students. That was really nerve-shattering.

My own field, really, for the first time. I gave my course in the history of the Old South. I had about, oh, sixty or seventy students in it. It was a nice-sized group. I had a seminar--it must have had seven or eight students in it. That I liked very much.

I spent all my spare time writing And the War Came, and also I went East for conventions, took the train East. I got travel money, research money, to do that. I conferred with a new director of the Indiana Historical Bureau, I believe in 1947. I had sent him the revised dissertation manuscript, and he thought it was great,"We're going to publish it." That was wonderful. It came out in 1949, finally. So I was hard at work on And the War Came. I finished that in 1948.

I sent it to LSU Press, Louisiana State University Press, and they loved it. They took it and published it in 1950, so that looked pretty good: a book out in 1949 and another book in 1950.

It had wonderful reviews. I didn't get a single critical review; it really was good. I found out later that it was second for the Pulitzer Prize. I found that out through the head of the LSU Press.

I had learned how to lecture to 400 people, and I was not too bad at it, I was pretty good. As a matter of fact, Hicks had heard that my lectures were very good, and my enrollment in my upper-division course had grown from about fifty or sixty students the first time to 200 or 300 students. I lost that small group there. Hicks once asked me whether I had preachers in my family or something.

The Peculiar Institution

To my best recollection, it was a former graduate student, Richard Heffner, who, hearing my feeling that there was a need for a new book, said,"Well, why don't you write it?" and I thought about it. I do insist that it had nothing to do with the civil rights movement.

The book came out in 1956, and so somebody suggested--I think it was Win [Winthrop] Jordan, actually, who used to be in our department--that it was somehow connected with the civil rights movement, and it really wasn't. My decision to write it dated back to the forties.

I began working on it as soon as I finished a book called And the War Came, which I finished in 1948. In the spring of 1952, I had applied for a Guggenheim, and I received one. I was due for a sabbatical. So I planned to be away for the whole year, from the summer of '52 to the summer of '53. That's when I was going to do the bulk of my research on this book.

In January, I moved to Chapel Hill. I had written to a friend at the university there, and he had found a quite satisfactory place for us to live in a suburb of Chapel Hill called Carboro, which is a mill town. It was rather interesting living in a Southern mill town for a while. I couldn't have done the book without going there, yes. I don't think it had any effect on the tone of my book. A lot of the Southerners whom I saw, when the book came out, didn't write to me and say,"This is a great book."

When the Guggenheim year was over in July, we came back to Berkeley. I had a little more research to clear up out of secondary sources, but I began writing in the late fall or maybe early winter of 1953-'54. It was a terrible experience beginning that book. I was terribly concerned about this book and my responsibility in writing it. I really wanted to write a book that would persuade Southerners that slavery wasn't quite like the myths and legends.

Now, the question of a publisher, Knopf published it, but I had an unfortunate relationship with Knopf with my book And the War Came--giving them an opportunity to reject it twice. It was a double humiliation. Anyway, And the War Came was out in 1950, and it had very good reviews. Alfred Knopf, the old man, was pretty peeved at one book man at Knopf, one of their field men, because he's the one who had solicited the manuscript. I had said,"I will never publish a book with Knopf." Anyway, this man came to me in 1952 at a convention and said,"I hear you're writing a book about slavery." I said,"Yes, but Knopf is not going to have it." I don't think is an exaggeration: I think he must have been under considerable pressure from Knopf because he practically got on his knees and asked for it. I said,"I'll never send you the manuscript. If you want to give me a contract without ever seeing the manuscript, okay." And I got it.

Sight unseen. I was never going to let them turn down another manuscript or another book of mine. So I'm very glad because Knopf makes beautiful books, and he does a pretty good job of promoting. So I sent the manuscript to Knopf the late summer of 1955, and I had an editor whose name I can't remember, and he disappeared before the book was finished. He probably was fired. Knopf was always firing people. So for the last bit, I didn't have an editor. The manuscript--it was a clean manuscript. I had a typist who really made no typos--I couldn't find any--and raised a couple of questions. She did a little bit of editing, actually, anyway. So the manuscript was a nice clean one that I sent to Knopf; then later in his reminiscences, Alfred Knopf said that in all the time that he was running his company, he had only received two manuscripts that could go straight to the publisher without editing. Mine was one, he said; another was a friend of his who also had written on black history. Well, that was partly true, but it also covered the fact, or disguised or concealed the fact, that my editor had been fired. Anyway, it's a nice story, and it never made me unhappy to have Knopf say that my manuscript was so letter-perfect.

It was published in October, 1956. As far as I know, it received no prizes. There was no Pulitzer prize or Bancroft prize. There was a prize at that time given for the best book in Southern history, and it didn't even win that prize, though I think it was by far the best book in Southern history that year. The only prize actually came years and years later -- I got the Lincoln prize in 1993. It was sort of a lifetime award, but the thing they always featured in their presentation prize was The Peculiar Institution, which most people think is the most important book I wrote.

Quotes

By Kenneth M. Stampp

"As one reflects upon the problem of causation one is driven to the conclusion that historians will never know, objectively and with mathematical precision, what caused the Civil War. Working with fragmentary evidence, possessing less than a perfect understanding of human behavior, viewing the past from the perspective of their own times, finding it impossible to isolate one historial event to test its significance apart from all others, historians must necessarily be somewhat tentative and conjectural in offering their interpretations.

It may then be asked whether there was any point to the enormous effort that has gone into the various attempts to find the causes of the Civil War. If after more than a century the debate is still inconclusive, would not the historian be wise to abandon his search for causes and confine himself to cataloging facts and compiling statistics? Is it not all the nore discouraging to find, as the documents in this book indicate, that historians often merely go back to interpretations advanced by partisans while the war was still in progress? I think not. Because the century of historical inquiry, if it leaves the causes of the Civil War still open to debate, has nevertheless been extremely illuminating. uncertainty about the war's causes has driven historians back to the sources time and time again, with the result that we have gredually enlarged our knowledge and and deepened our understanding of our greatest national crisis. Hence I find the prospect of a continuing debate, however much it may annoy those who find it disagreeable to live with uncertainties, the best promise that research and writing in this period of American history will continue to have vitality." -- Kenneth M. Stamp in the Introduction of"The Causes of The Civil War"

Critics of slavery, certain white men think, err when they assume that the Negroes suffered as much in bondage as white men would have suffered. One must remember, argue critics of critics, that to the Negroes slavery seemed natural; knowing no other life, they accepted it without giving the matter much thought. Not that slavery was a good thing, mind you-but still, it probably hurt the Negroes less than it did the whites. Indeed the whites were really more enslaved by Negro slavery than were the Negro slaves. This poet-slavery argument, like the ante-bellum proslavery argument, is based on upon some obscure and baffling logic. It is not unlike James H. Hammond's confident assertion that"our slaves are the happiest...human beings on whom the sun shines"; or his complaint that"into their eden is coming Satan in the guise of an abolitionist."

A former slave once pronounced a simple and chastening truth for those who would try to understand the meaning of bondage:"Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is,-'tishe who has endured.""I was black," he added,"but I had feelings of a man as well as any man." One can feel compassion for the antebellum southern white man; one can understand the moral dilemma in which he was trapped. But one must remember that the Negro, not the white man, was the slave, and the Negro gained the most from emancipation. When freedom came-even the quasi-freedom of"second-class citizenship"-the Negro, in literal truth, lost nothing but his chains. -- Kenneth M. Stampp in"The Peculier Institution"

NOT LONG AGO one of America's best political commentators made an observation about the problem of causation in history that every responsible historian would surely endorse:

I hold a kind of Tolstoyan view of history and believe that it is hardly ever possible to determine the real truth about how we got from here to there. Since I find it extremely difficult to uncover my own motives, I hesitate to deal with those of other people, and I positively despair at the thought of ever being really sure about what has moved whole nations and whole generations of mankind. No explanation of the causes and origins of any war -- of any large happening in history -- can ever be for me much more than a plausible one, a reasonable hypothesis. 1

This is a position to which I fully subscribe, and I believe that it is as valid for explanations of why a war was won or lost as for explanations of why a war began.

With this cautionary statement in mind, I am going to suggest one of the conditions, among several, that may help to explain why the South lost the Civil War. I think there is reason to believe that many Southerners -- how many I cannot say, but enough to affect the outcome of the war -- who outwardly appeared to support the Confederate cause had inward doubts about its validity, and that, in all probability, some unconsciously even hoped for its defeat. Like all historical explanations, my hypothesis is not subject to definitive proof; but I think it can be established as circumstantially plausible, because it is a reasonable explanation for a certain amount of empirical evidence....

Very soon, as a matter of fact, white Southerners were publicly expressing their satisfaction that the institution had been abolished and asserting that the whites, though perhaps not the blacks, were better off without it. Many were ready now to give voice to the private doubts they had felt before the war. They denied that slavery had anything to do with the Confederate cause, thus decontaminating it and turning it into something they could cherish. After Appomattox Jefferson Davis claimed that slavery"was in no wise the cause of the conflict," and Alexander H. Stephens argued that the war"was not a contest between the advocates or opponents of that Peculiar Institution." The speed with which white Southerners dissociated themselves from the cause of slavery is an indication of how great a burden it had been to them before Appomattox.

The acceptance of emancipation, of course, did not commit Southerners to a policy of racial equality. Rather, they assumed that the free Negroes would be an inferior caste, exposed to legal discrimination, denied political rights, and subjected to social segregation. They had every reason to assume this, because these, by and large, were the policies of most of the northern states toward their free Negro populations, and because the racial attitudes of the great majority of Northerners were not much different from their own. White Southerners were understandably shocked, therefore, when Radical Republicans, during the Reconstruction years, tried to impose a different relationship between the races in the South -- to give Negroes legal equality, political rights, and, here and there, even social equality. Now for the first time white Southerners organized a powerful partisan movement and resisted more fiercely than they ever had during the war. The difference, I think, was that in rejecting Radical race policy they felt surer of their moral position, for they were convinced that Northerners were perpetrating an outrage that Northerners themselves would not have endured. Thus the morale problem was now on the other side; and the North, in spite of its great physical power, lacked the will to prevail. Unlike slavery, racial discrimination did not disturb many nineteenth-century white Americans, North or South. Accordingly, in a relatively short time, chiefly because of the unrelenting opposition of white Southerners, Radical Reconstruction collapsed.

The outcome of Reconstruction is significant: it shows what a people can do against overwhelming odds when their morale is high, when they believe in their cause, and when they are convinced that defeat means catastrophe. The fatal weakness of the Confederacy was that not enough of its people really thought that defeat would be a catastrophe; and, moreover, I believe that many of them unconsciously felt that the fruits of defeat would be less bitter than those of success. -- Kenneth M. Stampp in"The Southern Road to Appomattox"

"Could all of this have been avoided -- would the course of the sectional conflict have been significantly altered -- if Buchanan had remained true to his pledge and demanded the submission of the whole Lecompton constitution to the voters of Kansas? That is a question no historian can answer. It is doubtful that a firm stand by Buchanan would have resulted in southern secession, because the provocation would not have been sufficient to unite even the Deep South behind so drastic a response. Nor would it have been sufficient to produce a major split in the national Democratic party. Accordingly, without a divided and demoralized national Democracy, Republican successes in the elections of 1858 and the presidential election of 1860 would have been a good deal more problematic.

Yet, contrary to the optimists of 1857, removing the Kansas question from national politics, although eliminating a serious irritant, would not have assured a lasting settlement of the sectional conflict. The possibilities for other crises over slavery were far too numerous. Sooner or later, any one of them, like Lecompton, might have disrupted the Democratic party, perhaps, as in 1860, led to the nomination of two Democratic presidential candidates, and resulted in the election of Abraham Lincoln or some other"Black" Republican. The triumph of a Republican presidential candidate proved to be the provocation that turned the southern threats of secession, heard so often in the past, to reality.

On December 6, 1858, after the Democratic disasters in the northern autumn elections, Buchanan sent his annual message to the lame-duck session of the Thirty-fifth Congress. He began with his own explication of the Lecompton controversy, expressing satisfaction that Kansas at last appeared to be"tranquil and prosperous" and was attracting thousands of emigrants. The rebellious activities of the"revolutionary Topeka organization" had been abandoned, thus proving that"resistance to lawful authority . . . cannot fail in the end to prove disastrous to its authors." Although he continued to believe that approval of the Lecompton constitution would have"restored peace to Kansas and harmony to the Union" more rapidly, he" cordially acquiesced" in the English bill which Congress preferred. Still, it was"to be lamented that a question so insignificant when viewed in its practical effects on the people of Kansas, whether decided one way or the other, should have kindled such a flame of excitement throughout the country." In this manner, at the end of a disruptive party controversy, Buchanan made his case for posterity.

Rarely, it must be admitted, has any President, during his term in office, confessed publicly that he was guilty of an important error of judgment. He may on occasion, using the passive voice, concede the possibility that mistakes had been made, leaving responsibility for them in doubt. Buchanan would not concede even that. Referring to his message of February 2, 1858, which recommended approval of the Lecompton constitution, he now assured Congress and the public that he had no regrets."In the course of my long public life," he defiantly asserted,"I have never performed any official act which in the retrospect has afforded me more heartfelt satisfaction." Let him be remembered, then, for that! -- Kenneth M. Stampp in"America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink"

About Kenneth M. Stampp

"In this reassessment of the period after Appomattox, Kenneth Stampp, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, calls the Southern version dead wrong. He is only one of dozens of contemporary historians who have recently undertaken to reconstruct the Reconstruction. Of these revisionists, Stampp is easily the most provocative. His proposition is that the impenitent postwar South set to work at once to restore the very order that it had supposedly yielded in defeat. The idea was to negate the war's outcome.

In this cause, says Stampp, the North served as unwitting accomplice. Lincoln's assassination propelled Andrew Johnson into the White House, a kind-hearted and derivative man anxious to implement Lincoln's injunction to let the South up easy. To staff the governments of the secessionist states, he granted wholesale pardons to Confederate officers and civil servants—and such men did not waste time accepting the chance to preside....

The South's version of Reconstruction blames everything on those vengeful Yankees who rammed their triumph down rebel throats—and implies that until then the rebels were willing to acknowledge the inevitable price of defeat. Stampp's purpose is to expose this version as a falsehood that has graduated, over the years, into a Southern mystique. His book presents compelling arguments that Selma is the predictable heritage of a South that, though losing a war, at once conspired to evade the moral indemnity that was its toll." -- Time review article on"THE ERA OF RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1877" (Apr. 23, 1965)

Basic Facts

Teaching Positions:
1940-41: Instructor, University of Wisconsin, Extension Division
1941-42: Instructor, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
1942-46: Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1946-83: From Assistant Professor to Morrison Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Visiting Professor: Harvard (1955), SUNY, Binghamton (1980), Colgate (1981) Williams College (1983)
Summers: University of Wisconsin, Madison (1945, 1946, 1949, 1952), University of Colorado, Boulder (1958).

Area of Research:
Slavery, American Civil War, and Reconstruction

Education:
BS, PhM, PhD, University of Wisconsin, Madison (1935, 1937, 1942)

Major Publications:

Contributor of articles to historical journals.

Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:

Awards and Grants:

Phi Beta Kappa (1935);
MA, Oxford University, 1961;
LHD, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1981;
Guggenheim Fellow, 1952-53,1967-68;
Fulbright Lecturer, Amerika-Institut, University of Munich, 1957, 1968, 1972;
Commonwealth Fund Lecturer, University of London, 1960;
Harmsworth Professor of American History, Oxford University, 1961-62;
President, Organization of American Historians, 1977-78;
Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford University, 1979;
Confederate Memorial Literary Society, Award of Merit, 1980;
Commonwealth Club, Silver Medals, 1981, 1991;
Shortlisted for Pulitzer Prize, 1991;
American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction, 1989;
Organization of American Historians Distinguished Service Award, 1993;
Lincoln Prize, Lincoln and Soldiers Institute, Gettysburg College, 1993;
Telford Taylor Public Service Award, Yeshiva University Law School, 1995;
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
Southern Historical Association Certificate of Achievement, 2005.

This HNN Doyen profile was published in the summer of 2006.

What They're Famous For

Winthrop D. Jordan is the William F. Winter Professor of History F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Mississippi. He received his AB from Harvard University, his MA from Clark University, and his Ph.D. from Brown University where he was awarded the Distinguishing Alumnus citation from the Graduate School. Jordan was briefly an Instructor of history at Phillips Exeter Academy and later a Professor of history at University of California, Berkeley, 1963-82, where he was also Associate Dean for Minority Group Affairs Graduate Division., 1968-70. He is the author of several books, including the award winning and groundbreaking White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and Tumult And Silence At Second Creek, he is also the co-author of several textbooks for junior high and high school students. Jordan is the recipient of seven book awards, including the National Book Award and a two time winner of the Bancroft Prize.

Jordan retired from teaching in 2004. To mark this event his former students edited and contributed essays as a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The anthology was published in 2005 as Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan. In the introduction Sheila L. Skemp described Jordan's impact on his students:"Jordan's legendary seminar-an introduction to the discipline, a requirement for every M.A. student in the Department of History, and experience no student will easily forget... He teaches his students to have an open mind about just what those voices from the past are saying. No matter how relevant his own work is, Jordan never allows his own political or ethical agenda to interfere with his reading of the sources, and he urged his students to put their own preconceived notions aside as well. When their work led them in new directions and they arrived, often despite themselves, at unexpected conclusions, no one was more delighted than Jordan to discover that common wisdom is neither infallible nor particularly wise."

Personal Anecdote

My distinguished medical career ended when as a college sophomore I got a D- in Chem 1A. I took no history courses in college. Partly this was owing to being a history professor's son, but also because I had taken a great deal of history at the secondary school level. Yet the principal reason was that Harvard offered a much less demanding major in its new Department of Social Relations. That major offered an appealingly wide range of courses in the social sciences and, fully as important, a lot less work. I spent nearly as much time singing with the Harvard Krokodiloes as going to classes.

After graduating in Social Relations I spent nearly a year in a home-office management training program at the Prudential Life Insurance Company. After several months at their headquarters in Newark, I realized that my interests and abilities were less than a good fit with bureaucratic management. So I cast about for a job teaching something ? anything (perhaps English, Physics, French, or History) ? at a prep school. Serendipitously, it turned out that Phillips Exeter was looking for someone to teach history, and we agreed that I should start work on an M.A. in U.S. history at Clark University. Teaching the extremely bright students at Exeter led me toward getting a Ph.D. In a stroke of good fortune I was denied admission at Harvard and then chose Brown because I was admitted there. I gradually became aware of how lucky I was, as I became interested in early American history because of the marvelous books at the John Carter Brown Library. Also, perhaps because of my undergraduate acquaintance with cultural anthropology, I found dealing with the 16th-18th centuries interesting and intellectually profitable because their denizens lived in cultures so different from modern ones.

At that time (the latter 1950s) the field of history was still dominated by my fellow male"WASPS." In the 1960s I enthusiastically welcomed signs of broadening in the profession and especially the slackening of the outrageous, falsely genteel anti-Semitism that had sapped the moral integrity of the old establishment.

Thus my undergraduate background meant that my approach to history was strongly influenced by the social sciences of the early 1950s. For my Ph.D. dissertation, I chose a subject that I thought of as a study of an old culture which was still imposing a crushing weight on the nation's publicly stated political and moral ideals. More particularly, I aimed to understand the large component of emotion and indeed irrationality that characterized the attitudes of the white majority toward"Negroes" in this country. Certainly"ideas" mattered in such an investigation, but they were often so blatantly absurd (especially in the"Age of Reason") that I was constantly led to pondering the cultural dimensions of affect concerning"race." No doubt I was influenced by the developing civil rights movement of the late 1950s, though I steered clear of reading much about it in newspapers. More important, the revelations about the wartime Holocaust in Europe loomed over the social sciences in those years; indeed it was no longer possible to think about"racial prejudice" without being acutely aware of the horrifying consequences of politicized anti-Semitism. I thus came to history with intellectual interests and perspectives that virtually dictated the kinds of topics that would engage my attention throughout my historical career. In addition, my mother's side of the family was still steeped in a Quaker and strongly abolitionist tradition. Less obviously, my exposure to the barbarous prose of the social sciences led to a determination on my part to write in language that at least attempted a measure of grace and clarity.

My dissertation dealt with a matter about which historians had written little. Even after Kenneth Stampp's revolutionary study, The Peculiar Institution (1956) and the massive amount of research stimulated by Stanley Elkins's assertions about"Sambo" in his Slavery (1959), white opinions about blacks took a back seat to"black culture," which by the early 1970s was being called the"hottest field" in historical studies.

Many years after publication of White over Black (1968) I wrote more directly about certain black slaves as they became involved in a conspiracy near Natchez, Mississippi. Over this long period, however, I also published short pieces on"other" subjects that seemed to me closely related to racial attitudes in American culture. These topics included past definitions of the temporal stages of the human life-cycle as well as familial imagery in political thought. Yet there was indeed an intellectual glue that bound such explorations together with my further inquiries into important matters about race that White over Black had failed to cover, including the culture of Tudor England and development of the United States's unique one-drop racial rule. If I had to name this glue, I would call it"affect."

Because I had focussed on"thought" that was not intellective, I warmly welcomed a recent retrospective assessment of White over Black by Lawrence Shore in History and Theory which concluded that the book had shown that"if you ignore the evidence it is easy to deny the power of the irrational." Indeed such persistent denial must be easy, since so many historians had and have been achieving it for years. Denial has recently spilled over into discussions of"race." I hope soon to write about the modern social and scientific conceptualizations of"race," which has proven such an appallingly dangerous term that many critics want to ban the word itself and to claim, mistakenly, that it is totally foreign to natural science including evolutionary biology. For present purposes I will merely emphasize that human beings constitute a single entity, whether it is called a single species, a breeding population, a gene pool, children of God, or the family of man. I personally find great value and aptness in all these designations. My doubts arise only in regard to the second term in the species name, Homo sapiens.

Quotes

By Winthrop D. Jordan

"The dilemma was apparent. Virginia's distress was then America's writ large. The white American wanted, indeed had, to remain faithful to himself and to his great experiment. In doing so he was caught between the necessity, on the one hand, of maintaining his identity as the fruit of England's and Europe's loins and as the good seed of civilization planted in the wilderness, and on the other, the necessity of remaining faithful to his own image as the world's exemplar of liberty and equalitarianism, as the best hope of the civilization which he cherished. Whichever path he took he seemed to abandon part of himself, so that neither could be taken with assurance or good conscience. Individual Americans divided according to their private necessities, while at the same time the nation divided in response to pressures generated by economic, demographic, and cultural differences, but no American and no section of America could rest at ease with the decision. For Virginians especially, for many Americans, and for the nation as a whole it was impossible to make a clearcut choice.
Within every white American who stood confronted by the Negro, there had arisen a perpetual duel between his higher and lower natures. His cultural conscience--his Christianity, his humanitarianism, his ideology of liberty and equality--demanded that he regard and treat the Negro as his brother and his countryman, as his equal. At the same moment, however, many of his most profound urges, especially his yearning to maintain the identity of his folk, his passion for domination, his sheer avarice, and his sexual desire, impelled him toward conceiving and treating the Negro as inferior to himself, as an American leper. At closer view, though, the duel appears more complex than a conflict between the best and worst in the white man's nature, for in a variety of ways the white man translated his"worst" into his"best." Raw sexual aggression became retention of purity, and brutal domination became faithful maintenance of civilized restraints. These translations, so necessary to the white man's peace of mind, were achieved at devastating cost to another people. But the enormous toll of human wreckage was by no means paid exclusively by the Negro, for the subtle translation of basic urges in the white man necessitated his treating the Negro in a fashion which tortured his own conscience, that very quality in his being which necessitated those translations. So the peace of mind the white man sought by denying his profound inexorable drives toward creation and destruction (a denial accomplished by affirmations of virtue in himself and depravity in the Negro) was denied the white man; he sought his own peace at the cost of others and found none. In fearfully hoping to escape the animal within himself the white man debased the Negro, surely, but at the same time he debased himself.
Conceivably there was a way out from the vicious cycle of degradation, an opening of better hope demanding an unprecedented and perhaps impossible measure of courage, honesty, and sheer nerve. If the white man turned to stare at the animal within him, if he once admitted unashamedly that the beast was there, he might see that the old foe was a friend as well, that his best and his worst derived from the same deep well of energy. If he once fully acknowledged the powerful forces which drove his being, the necessity of imputing them to others would drastically diminish. If he came to recognize what had happened and was still happening with himself and the African in America, if he faced the unpalatable realities of the tragedy unflinchingly, if he were willing to call the beast no more the Negro's than his own, then conceivably he might set foot on a better road. Common charity and his special faith demanded that he make the attempt. But there was little in his historical experience to indicate that he would succeed. -- Winthrop D. Jordan in"White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812"

About Winthrop D. Jordan

"This book, Winthrop D. Jordan tells us in his opening sentence,"is a story, but at the same time it is not." With this paradox, Mr. Jordan characterizes the outcome of more than 20 years of investigation into events that occurred nearly a century and a half ago."Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy" is at once an effort to capture the experience of black and white Mississippians confronting the implications of the Civil War for Southern slavery and also -- and perhaps even more fundamentally -- an exploration into the nature of historical inquiry and interpretation.
Mr. Jordan, a professor of history and Afro-American studies at the University of Mississippi, has written a work of historical scholarship that leaves its scaffolding standing and visible, a study in which the process of discovery is at least as important as the result. He not only invites the engaged reader to participate in the struggle to understand the past, but he also includes almost all the available evidence in appendixes. -- Drew Gilpin Faust reviewing"Tumult and Silence at Second Creek An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy"

Basic Facts

Teaching Positions:
Brown University, Providence, RI, lecturer in history, 1959-61; College of William and Mary, Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, fellow, 1961-63; University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor, 1963-67, associate professor, 1967-69, professor of history, 1969-1982. William F. Winter Professor of History F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Mississippi, 1982-2004.

Area of Research:
Afro-American History, Early American History.

Education:
Harvard University, A.B., 1953;
Clark University, M.A., 1957;
Brown University, Ph.D., 1960

Major Publications:

Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:

Jordan has also contributed numerous articles and book review to professional journals

Awards:

Jordan's many awards include fellowships from the Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, as well as a Distinguished Alumnus Citation from Brown University’s Graduate School.
1968, Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians;
1969, Winner of the National Book Award;
1969, Winner of the Bancroft Prize, Columbia University;
1968, Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa all for White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
1993, Winner of the Bancroft Prize;
1993, the Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Award;
1992 the Jules and Frances Landry Award all for Tumult and Silence at Second Creek An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy.
1976, Fellowship Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS).

Additional Info:

Jordan worked at Prudential Life Insurance Co., Newark, NY, as a management trainee, 1953-54; and then at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH, as an instructor in history, 1955-56.

Jordan has been widely reported in the press and has made several appearances on C-Span regarding the debate to whether Thomas Jefferson did in fact father his slave Sally Hemmings's children, based on his claim in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968) that"She bore five, from 1795 to 1808; and though he was away from Monticello a total of roughly two-thirds of this period, Jefferson was at home nine months prior to each birth."

What They're Famous For

Personal Anecdote

I was lucky enough to be studying history when the ground was shifting beneath the older definitions of the field. The changes began for me with the French social history I read in college at Swarthmore from Paul Beik, and the Russian social history I read in graduate school at Yale from Firuz Kazemzadeh. I did not at the time register that these subjects and the methods of approaching them were new. But although I was already a"social" historian--my dissertation focused largely on runaway serfs--still the idea that historical questions could be framed and researched about women, let alone a new-to-me concept like gender, did not reach me until 1969. And then it arrived not through academic channels but through a social movement.

In 1969 I was teaching at the University of Massachusetts/Boston where I was hired in the field of my dissertation and PhD, Russian history. But the women's movement had gripped me, as so many others, and I was a participant in an informal group of scholars who had the idea to examine what historical research might yield on questions of gender. We thought we were pioneers. We thought we were inventing new ideas. But then I went to Harvard's library and began to browse. To my surprise I found a few superb books–deeply researched, intellectually both analytic and synthetic. One example is Alice Clark's The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, published in London in 1919. From this work I learned more than from any other my understanding of gender as a material, not just a cultural, practice.

The I looked at the library check-out slip pasted to the inside back cover. Clark's book had not been checked out since the 1930s. I soon found others equally dusty and forgotten.

I found this ominous. How could such a good book have been so neglected? History-writing was supposed to progress, and to do so by standing on the shoulders of previous scholars, incorporating or challenging their work and moving beyond it. Soon the new women's-history scholars would learn that the number of female historians and university professors declined between 1920 and 1960. Their work was all but lost for five decades, and entirely lost in the training of new historians in this period.

I hope my generation of scholars examining gender, and those that followed, through their prodigious publishing and teaching of the past three decades, have made a more lasting impact, but I don't take anything for granted any more. When I wrote a book on the history of birth control politics, published now 30 years ago, I assumed that reproduction control was an aspect of modernity and women's emancipation, a practice here to stay. How wrong I was. History must always struggle for independence from the present. And our resistance is needed not only against scholars defending"tradition." Sometimes we have to contest the interpretations of our allies. I remember being criticized by some activists in the movement against violence against women because they saw my emphasis on the"agency" of domestic violence victims as a form of blaming the victim.

I was lucky in another regard: there were plenty of jobs when I finished graduate school. I enjoyed the fruits of a public and private welfare state, however modest, that paid for my undergraduate and graduate education (the National Merit Scholarship and National Defense Education Act programs) and supported the universities at which I taught (the universities of Massachusetts and Wisconsin). The economy was strong, taxation was less regressive than it is today, deindustrialization was not yet a largescale phenomenon, and Cold War competition was stimulating education spending. And because there were academic jobs, I could take the risk of changing my field of concentration, from early modern Russian borderlands to 19 th and 20th century US gender, labor, and social policy. I do not need to tell HNN readers how many extremely talented history scholars lack these opportunities today, but it is worth pointing out that we are all the losers for the mistreatment of this talent and dedication.

Quotes

By Linda Gordon

When the posse arrived at Margarita Chacón's house, George Frazer, supervisor of the copper smelter, banged on the door with the butt of his Winchester. Neville Leggatt, the only member of the posse who actually knew Margarita, cringed; when she opened the door he kept his hand away from his revolver and he hoped the others would do likewise. Although it was already 11 PM and raining, Leggatt knew exactly where to go because, he said, he knew every Mexican in North Clifton since he was delivery man for the company store, and he didn't think there would be any trouble from Margarita. She was familiar to most of Clifton: a schoolteacher who taught the Mexican kids in her own home, a devout woman who went to church every day, dressed entirely in black, her face hidden under her black shawl. Her husband Cornelio was a skimmer for the copper smelter, earning top wages for a Mexican. Frazer naturally did the talking for the posse. He said that she was to hand over the orphans the priest had given her. She asked"if I had an order from the padre to take the child; but I said, No ... the citizens of the town demand the children back ..." These children were 4-year-old Jerome Shanley and 3-year-old Katherine Fitzpatrick, Irish Catholic orphans from New York City; they had been shipped out to Arizona on an orphan train to their new home with Mrs. Chacón as arranged by the padre. Frazer testified (later, at the trial) that she was"very obliging and accommodating" to the four armed men. But that was when he was trying to avoid the impression that the children had been taken by force. It's true that after they had waited in the wind and rain a while she invited them in, seeing that they were already carrying three kids they had picked up from Francisco Alvidrez and from Lee Windham's Mexican wife whose name they didn't know. But Leggatt didn't find Margarita so obliging, and pointed out that she took 45 minutes to confer with her family and dress the two orphans before handing them over. In fact he said she was the only one who did not want to give up the children--as he also said that she was the only one who could speak English, without seeing any connection between his two statements. Afterwards they went to the home of José Bonillas so by the time they made their way back to the hotel the four of them were carrying and pulling along six kids through the rain. -- Linda Gordon in"The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction," 1999

To speak of"big government" as a unifying factor is to depoliticize Progressivism, just as that slogan today functions to shut down debate about what government should do. The slogan avoids the question on which Progressives were most divided: how democratic should government be? Some advocated democratizing reforms, such as woman suffrage, while others fought for antidemocratic reforms such as disfranchisement of the poor and people of color. When I was in high school in Portland, Oregon, studying civics, as we used to call it, my lessons included prominently the initiative and the referendum (because Oregon was the first state to adopt these quintessentially Progressive measures) and an annual field trip to Bonneville Dam where we saw the giant generators producing our cheap public electricity--and these were represented to us in Oregon as the highest achievements of democracy. But we did not learn about the widespread adoption of voter registration and other methods aimed at disfranchisement of the poor, African Americans and other people of color. In other words, we were taught a highly selective story of the development of government.

The nature of a state cannot be measured linearly, from small to large. A more accurate generalization about Progressives points to their conviction that government should rely on expertise. Expertise, I suppose, is what you get when you combine higher education with the notion of impartiality--that is, the idea of rising above politics. The symbol and the most influential application of this faith in expertise was the development of the modern social survey, notably by WEB Du Bois and Florence Kelley. Whether they were studying poverty, fertilizer, or prostitution, what was distinctively Progressive in this vision of expertise was the idea that the data thus collected and presented should form the basis of public policy--in fact, that expertise could resolve seemingly unresolvable political stalemates. Not only convinced that the social sciences could exclude bias, Progressives also thought that experts were more honest and less corruptible than politicians. Experts were to extend their responsibility not only to making recommendations and writing legislation and judicial decisions, but then to agitating for these policies. One mark of their success is the way that Congressional investigations and reports of Congressional Committees or special Commissions have become a standard part of our political process. Historians, of course, were much less able to show the necessity of their expertise to government, but they nevertheless absorbed the notion of expert impartiality into their scholarship.

Some of the increasing reliance on expertise derived from the goal of securing the public welfare. The practice recognized that industrial and technological development left consumers and workers defenseless without expert protection. How could the buyer know if the milk was adulterated when she was no longer in direct contact with the dairy farmer? How could the copper miner know that the hard-rock dust was giving him silicosis? And if they suspected these dangers, as many lay people did, how could they get their concerns onto the political agenda? By their very professional self-aggrandizement, experts not only built careers for themselves but made themselves political players who could generate legislation and legal decisions. Public health experts, armed with germ theory, proved that typhoid and diphtheria could not be confined to the slums and used this proof to agitate for public sewers and water treatment. It took engineering expertise to make sure that those who worked in the new taller buildings could be protected from fire and structural collapse, or that those who walked the sidewalks outside could still feel some sun and air. We all benefit from the work of scientists demonstrating the link between tobacco and cancer. We all benefit from the work of social and biological scientists who have demonstrated that empowering women works better than population control programs to lower birth rates, that condoms can prevent HIV transmission.

But the meanings and consequences of the use of expertise in government are themselves conflicting. Many Progressives--including both those we might today call liberal and those we might call conservative-- tended to view both the working class and the corporate owning class as corrupt, and as a solution sought to empower middle-class experts as super-citizens whose recommendations would supersede those of ordinary citizens. Many attempted to combat the corruption of partisan politics by moving large sectors of government outside the political arena, for example through hiring town managers rather than electing mayors. But not all Americans were equally able to become qualified as experts or to get experts to listen. In class, race and gender terms, Progressive expertise contributed not only to growing inequality but also to the decline of participatory politics even among white men.

Further complicating the story, it is not always easy to distinguish"good" from"bad" expertise."Americanization" agents taught immigrant women to get their newborns immediately onto regular feeding schedules, never to feed them on demand; just as they also taught that babies shouldn't be fed spoiled cows' milk. Progressives did not always seek out ways to integrate expertise into democracy, and in fact many called on expertise to delegitimate democratic decision-making. The Progressive faith in supposedly nonpartisan professionals was often paired with deep-seated distrust of the uneducated, hard-drinking, allegedly easily corruptible immigrant or black or Mexican worker. But of course the uneducated are by no means always ignorant. In fact, miners did know that the hard-rock dust was making them ill, while the experts were still insisting that the disease was TB caused by the miners' own unhygienic living conditions; but the miners could not get their knowledge respected until the expert Alice Hamilton actually went down into the mines to sample the dust.

Yet at the same time Progressivism was characterized by extremely high levels of grassroots activism.... -- Linda Gordon,"Progressive Expertise: an Oxymoron?", for conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, March 2002, published as"If the Progressives were Advising Us Today, Should We Listen?" Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era, April 2002.

About Linda Gordon

"Gordon's effort to situate birth control in the material history of women's lives gives her history its analytical edge. In the end, Linda Gordon's revised history of birth control reminds us that women's bodies remain battlefields crossed by the ideological and property relations of the societies in which we live." -- Rosemary Hennessy, Science & Society reviewing"The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America"

In this unflinching history of family violence, the historian Linda Gordon traces policies on child abuse and neglect, wife-beating, and incest from 1880 to 1960. Drawing on hundreds of case records from social agencies devoted to dealing with the problem, Gordon chronicles the changing visibility of family violence as gender, family, and political ideologies shifted.

From the"discovery" of family violence in the 1870s--when it was first identified as a social, rather than a personal, problem--to the women's and civil rights movements of the twentieth century, Heroes of Their Own Lives illustrates how public perceptions of marriage, poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, and responsibility worked for and against the victims of family violence.

Powerful, moving, and tightly argued, Heroes of Their Own Lives shows family violence to be an indicator of larger social problems. Examining its sources as well as its treatment, Gordon offers both an honest understanding of the problem and an unromantic view of the difficulties in stopping it. Originally published in 1988, when it received the Berkshire Prize and the Gustavus Myers Award, Heroes of Their Own Lives remains the most extensive and important history of family violence in America. --

When America's War Relocation Authority hired Dorothea Lange to photograph the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942, they put a few restrictions on her work. Barbed wire, watchtowers and armed soldiers were off limits, they declared. And no pictures of resistance, either. They wanted the roundup and sequestering of Japanese- Americans documented—but not too well. Working within these limits, Lange, who is best known for her photographs of migrant farmers during the Depression, nonetheless produced images whose content so opposed the federal objective of demonizing Japanese-Americans that the vast majority of the photographs were suppressed throughout WWII (97% of them have never been published at all). Editors Gordon and Okihiro set this first collection of Lange's internment work within technical, cultural and historical contexts. Gordon (The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction) discusses Lange's professional methods and the formation of her"democratic-populist" beliefs. Okihiro (Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II) traces the history of prejudice against Japanese Americans, with emphasis on internees' firsthand accounts. But the bulk of the book is given over to Lange's photographs. Several of these are as powerful as her most stirring work, and the final image—of a grandfather in the desolate Manzanar Center looking down in anguish at the grandson between his knees—is worth the price of the book alone. -- Publishers Weekly reviewing"Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment"

Basic Facts

Teaching Positions:
University of Massachusetts, Boston, instructor, 1968-69, assistant professor, 1970-75, associate professor, 1975-81, professor of history, 1981-84;
University of Wisconsin, Madison, professor of history, 1984-90, Florence Kelley Professor of History, 1990-2000, Vilas Distinguished Research Professor, 1993-2000;
New York University, New York, NY, professor of history, 2000--.

Scholar in residence, Stanford University, summer, 1979, Dickinson College, summer, 1987;
Bunting Institute fellow, Radcliffe College, 1983-84;
visiting professor, University of Amsterdam, 1984;
Bird Memorial Lecturer, University of Maine, 1986;
invited residency, Bellagio Center, Italy, 1992;
Swarthmore College, Eugene Lang Visiting Professor, 2001;
Princeton University, Lawrence Stone Visiting Professor, 2004.

Area of Research:
Twentieth-century U.S. social, political, and social policy history; women and gender; family; U.S. Southwest.

Education:
Swarthmore College, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1961;
Yale University, M.A., 1963, Ph.D. (with distinction), 1970.

Major Publications:

Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:

Awards and Grants:

National Book Award in History nomination, 1976, for Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, and 1988, for Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880- 1960;
National Institute of Mental Health grant, 1979-82;
National Endowment for Humanities fellow, 1979; American Council of Learned Societies travel grant, 1980;
Outstanding Achievement Award, University of Massachusetts, 1982-83;
Antonovych Prize, 1983, for Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth- Century Ukraine; Guggenheim fellowship, 1983-84, 1987;
American Council of Learned Societies/ Ford Foundation fellowship, 1985;
University of Wisconsin graduate school research awards, 1985-95;
Joan Kelley Prize for best book in women's history or theory of the American Historical Association; Wisconsin Library Association Award, 1988, for Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960;
American Philosophical Society Research Award, 1988-89;
Chicago Women in Publishing award, 1990, for Women, the State, and Welfare;
Berkshire Prize for best book in women's history, and Gustavus Myers Award, both 1995, both for Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the Origins of Welfare;
Bancroft and Beveridge Prize, 1999, and Banta Award, Wisconsin Library Association, 2000, both for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.

Additional Info:

Gordon has given numerous academic lectures, presented papers, and participated in conferences and annual meetings throughout the world; manuscript and proposal referee for many national organizations and presses, including National Endowment for the Humanities, Temple University Press, Columbia University Press, University of California Press, Northeastern University Press, University of Illinois Press, Oxford University Press, American Council of Learned Societies, National Humanities Center, Woodrow Wilson Center, Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, Princeton University Press, university presses of California, Cambridge, Chicago, Columbia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Northeastern, Ohio, Oxford, Temple, Canadian Social Science Research Council, and U.K. Social Science Research Council.

Lecturer at numerous universities and colleges. Consultant/adviser to numerous local, civic, academic, media, and government organizations.

Gordon has contributed to many anthologies and encyclopedias, including Encyclopedia of the American Left, Encyclopedia of American Women's History, and Encyclopedia of American History. Contributor of articles and reviews to numerous periodicals and newspapers, including New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Dissent, Chronicle of Higher Education, Against the Current, and Nation. Member of editorial board, American Historical Review, 1990-93, Contemporary Sociology, 1994--, Journal of American History and Journal of Policy History, both 1994-97, and of Signs, Feminist Studies, Journal of Women's History, Contention, and Gender and History; referee for many scholarly journals.

Gordon has also worked as a consultant and historian for television production and videotape productions, including Spare the Rod: the Politics of Child Abuse, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1988; War on Poverty, 1994-95, PBS; The Roots of Roe, Connecticut Public Television, 1994; The Troubled American Family, 1996; Family in Crisis, 1996; Children of the Great Depression, American History Project; Barbie!, KCTS-TV; History of Birth Control, Perini Productions; A Century of Woman, Paramount Studios; History Matters Web site; and Encyclopaedia Britannica Web site on women's history, 1998. Also guest on numerous television and radio programs, including those on PBS and National Public Radio (NPR).

What They're Famous For

Stephan Thernstrom is the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University where he teaches American social history, and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was born in Port Huron, Michigan and educated in the public schools of Port Huron and Battle Creek. He graduated with highest honors from Northwestern University in 1956, and was awarded the Ph.D. by Harvard in 1962. He held appointments as assistant professor at Harvard, associate professor at Brandeis University, and professor at UCLA before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1973. In 1978-1979 he was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and Professorial Fellow at Trinity College.

He has been awarded fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the John M. Olin Foundation, and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mathematical Social Science Board, the American Philosophical Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. His most recent book, co-authored with Abigail Thernstrom, is No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. He also collaborated with Abigail Thernstrom in America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. He is the editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, the co-editor of Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History and Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity , and the author of Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a 19th-Century City,

His books have been awarded the Bancroft Prize in American History, the Harvard University Press Faculty Prize, the Waldo G. Leland Prize of the American Historical Association, and the R. R. Hawkins Award of the Association of American Publishers. He also has written widely in periodicals for general audiences, including The New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, The Public Interest, Commentary, Dissent, Partisan Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He was appointed to serve on the National Humanities Council by President Bush in 2002.

Personal Anecdote

I cannot offer a neat little anecdote that sums up why I became a historian. I came relatively late and only gradually to the discipline. Indeed, I must confess that my interest in anything that happened in school developed relatively late in the day. I was bored out of my mind in my elementary and junior high classes, and devoted my energies to making life miserable for my teachers. Dipping the pigtails of the girl sitting at the desk in front of me into my inkwell (yes, we had inkwells back in Port Huron, Michigan in the 1940s), releasing garter snakes in class, putting thumb tacks on the teacher's chair, etc. I was an ardent reader from an early age, but saw no connection between the books I was devouring and what the teachers were trying to do. One day in 8th-grade English, the teacher urged us to consider attending college, not very common for my age group those days. To underscore the point that mere brains would not suffice, she declared that Steve Thernstrom might be smart enough for college but never would make it there because he was such a goof-off and troublemaker.

When I hit 9th-grade, we were all placed in one of three tracks--academic, general, or vocational. It was no surprise to me that I was consigned to Metal Shop, while the diligent, well-behaved students were put in Latin. It was a great surprise to my mother, though, and she marched over to the school and raised hell. As a result of her intervention, I did get into Latin, and was a crucial turning point in my education. I loved it.

In the summer before 10th-grade, we moved from Port Huron to Battle Creek. I continued with Latin, but found a new love that engaged me even more deeply—the debate team. The academic subjects other than Latin continued to bore me; certainly the U.S. and World History surveys I took were uninspiring. But the debate coach proved to be the greatest teacher I had until graduate school, and he was responsible for my intellectual awakening. I spent more time working on debate than on all my other courses put together, and my enthusiasm for it determined my choice of college.

All the best students in my high school automatically went on to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the only one who went East to an Ivy was the son of a Princeton man, and he followed in his daddy's footsteps. I decided, though, that Michigan was not for me, because it had recently abandoned intercollegiate debate. So I chose to attend Northwestern, which not only had a strong debate team but scholarships for students who were good at it. The scholarship required that recipients enroll in the School of Speech rather than the College of Liberal Arts, so that's what I had to do to be eligible for it. That did not prove very constraining. The requirements of the School of Speech were minimal and the courses were a snap, so that I always took five courses rather than the required four-course load and had ample opportunity to explore the liberal arts. Everything in the social sciences and humanities interested me in my college years. I did a fair amount of work in history (mostly European), in economics, sociology, and political science. I thought seriously about graduate school in economics, but my teacher in an economic history course advised me that I needed a strong math background to get anywhere in economics. After floundering in the math class I took as a result of this advice—ironically in light of the quantitative character of much of my later research—I gave up that idea, and decided on graduate school in political science.

When I came Harvard, in 1956, political science was taught in the Department of Government, and the faculty's commitment to that old-fashioned label was significant. The teachers I had my first year were all historians of sorts. V.O. Key taught a historically rich course in Southern politics; Robert G. McCloskey's American Constitutional Law would have fit perfectly into a history department's offerings. Most important to me was the offerings of the political theorist Louis Hartz, who had published his remarkable volume, The Liberal Tradition in America, the year before I arrived in Cambridge.

Hartz dazzled me, and it happened he was then serving as chair of the interdisciplinary History of American Civilization Ph.D. program. My excitement over his explorations in what later came to be called" consensus history" led me to transfer into that program. I was not primarily interested in the history of political thought, though, and could not accept Hartz's view that the roots of American exceptionalism were fundamentally ideological. I thought that a closer look at the evolution of the American social structure would illuminate the question more than further study of Madison or Calhoun. After entering the Am Civ program, I studied with Hartz, Oscar Handlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Frank Freidel, and took two sociology courses, one on social stratification and social mobility, and another, from Barrington Moore on modern social theory and political power.

After passing my orals, I began work on my dissertation--what became Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a 19th-Century City--under the wise guidance of Oscar Handlin. The underlying question it addressed—the absence of a class-conscious proletariat in the United States—had been explored by Hartz, and by Sombart and Marx before him. But I sought to answer it by using some simple quantitative techniques borrowed from sociology as well as the usual tools of the historian, building on a foundation supplied by the rarely used manuscript schedules of the U.S. Census I chose to work on Newburyport rather than another city conveniently near Cambridge—Lowell or Lawrence, say—because it was famous in American sociology as the site of W. Lloyd Warner's five-volume"Yankee City" series.

While I was doing my Newburyport research, I continued to learn from exposure to scholars in other disciplines. I worked as a section leader in sociologist David Riesman's"American Character and Social Structure" and political scientist Samuel Beer's"Western Thought and Institutions" A fellowship from the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies gave me a final year free to do the final writing of the dissertation, and fruitful contact with specialists in urban economics, urban politics, demography, geography, and city planning.

As I neared the end of graduate school, I had come to consider myself an American historian, and those were the job advertisements that I began to pore over anxiously. (I did have an inquiry from a leading sociology department, but decided that much of what I wanted to teach wouldn't fit there and withdrew my name from consideration.) But I was also determined to keep up with the other social sciences as much as possible, and to make use of concepts and methods from other disciplines that might prove useful in explaining historical developments. In the four decades or so that have passed since then, my interests have changed to some extent; I work mainly on the 20th century rather than 19th century now, for example. But I still am doing the kind of history I learned to do in graduate school.

Quotes

By Stephan Therstrom

"In 1991, 13 percent of the whites of the United States said that they had generally"unfavorable" opinions about black Americans. In an ideal world, that number would be zero. But such a world is nowhere to be found, In Czechoslovakia that same year, 49 percent of Czechs had"unfavorable" attitudes toward the Hungarian ethnic minority living within the boundaries of their country. Likewise, 45 percent of West Germans disliked the Turks living in Germany; 54 percent of East Germans regarded Poles negatively; 40 percent of Hungarians frowned on the Romanians who lived among them; and 42 percent of the French disdained Arab immigrants from North Africa. In only two dozen European countries surveyed - Britain and Spain - was the proportion of the majority group less than twice as high as in the United States.

Much of the animosity had deep historical roots. In 1991, a third of the Poles still had an"unfavorable" opinion of Jews, for example. Gypsies had the most enemies, with unfavorable rating ranging from a low of 50 percent in Spain to 91 percent in Czechoslovakia."Ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds are thriving across Europe as the 20th Century draws to an end," noted two commentators on the study. As the movement toward European union increases the flow of the labor across national boundaries,"the Continent could turn into a tinderbox," they warned.

Against this yardstick the racial views of white Americans look remarkably good. But are seemingly tolerant whites simply more hypocritical than Czechs or French? Perhaps they have learned to keep their animus hidden from public view. We think not. Although different ways of framing questions about racial prejudice yield slightly different answers, the bulk of the evidence squares with the 1991 survey results: when it comes to intergroup tolerance, Americans rate high by international standards." -- Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom in"America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible"

"The racial gap in academic achievement is an educational crisis, but it is also the main source of ongoing racial inequality. And racial inequality is America's great unfinished business, the wound that remains unhealed. Thus, this is a book about education, but it also addresses the central civil rights issue of our time: our failure to provide first-class education for black and Hispanic students, in both cities and suburbs.

The black high school graduation rate has more than doubled since 1960. And blacks attend college at a rate that is higher than it was for whites just two decades ago. But the good news ends there. The gap in academic achievement that we see today is actually worse than it was fifteen years ago. In the 1970s and through most of the 1980s, it was closing, but around 1988 it began to widen, with no turnaround in sight.

Today, at age 17 the typical black or Hispanic student is scoring less well on the nation's most reliable tests than at least 80 percent of his or her white classmates. In five of the seven subjects tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a majority of black students perform in the lowest category -- Below Basic. The result: By twelfth grade, African Americans are typically four years behind white and Asian students, while Hispanics are doing only a tad better than black students. These students are finishing high school with a junior high education.

Students who have equal skills and knowledge will have roughly equal earnings. That was not always true, but it is today. Schooling has become the key to racial equality. No wonder that Robert Moses, a luminous figure in the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, is convinced that"the absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961." Algebra, he believes, is"the gatekeeper of citizenship."

Literacy, too, is a"gatekeeper," and the deadline for learning is alarmingly early."For many students...the die is cast by eighth grade. Students without the appropriate math and reading skills by that grade are unlikely to acquire them by the end of high school...," a U.S. Department of Education study has concluded.

Race has famously been called the"American dilemma." But since the mid-1960s, racial equality has also been an American project. An astonish-ing, peaceful revolution in the status of blacks and the state of race relations has transformed the country. And yet too few Americans have recognized and acknowledged the stubborn inequalities that only better schools can address.

Even civil rights groups have long averted their gaze from the disquieting reality."You can have a hunch that black students are not doing as well, but some of this was surprising," A. V. Fleming, president of the Urban League in Fort Wayne, Indiana, said, as the picture of low black achievement began to emerge in the late 1990s. In Elk Grove, California, an affluent suburb of Sacramento, black parents were shocked, angry, and in tears when they learned of the low test scores of their kids."People know that this is an important issue, and they don't know how to talk about it," said Philip Moore, the principal of the local middle school, who is black himself.

For too long, the racial gap in academic performance was treated not only by civil rights leaders, but by the media, and even by scholars, as a dirty secret -- something to whisper about behind closed doors. As if it were racist to say we have a problem: Black and Hispanic kids, on average, are not doing well in school.

Suddenly, however, this shamefully ignored issue has moved to the front and center of the education stage. In part, the new attention is simply a response to an altered economic reality. A half century ago, an eighth-grade dropout could get a secure and quite well-paid job at the Ford Motor Company or U.S. Steel. Today, the Honda plant in Ohio does not hire people who cannot pass a test of basic mathematical skills.

Demographic change, too, has forced Americans to pay attention to an educational and racial catastrophe in their midst. Fifty years ago, Hispanic children were no more than 2 percent of the school population. Today, a third of all American students are black or Latino. In California, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas white schoolchildren have become a numerical minority. These numbers, in themselves, drive home the urgency of educating all children.

The unprecedented sense of urgency is unmistakable in No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 version of the nation's omnibus 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The central aim of the revised statute, as its preamble states boldly, is"to close the achievement gap...so that no child is left behind." Closing the gap is the core purpose of the legislation -- and the test of its eventual success.

Thus, the act requires all states to test children in grades 3-8 and report scores broken down by race, ethnicity, and other demographic characteristics associated with educational disadvantage. Each group must show significant annual progress. Affluent districts will no longer be able to coast along, hiding their lower-performing black and Hispanic students in overall averages that make their schools look good. A bucket of very cold water has been poured on educators -- and particularly those who have been quite complacent. NCLB has been an overdue attention-getter. At a well-attended national meeting on education in September 2002, the audience was asked to name the most important new policy requirement in No Child Left Behind; closing the racial and ethnic achievement gap was the clear winner.

Indifference to minority children who arrive in kindergarten already behind and continue to flounder is no longer an option for schools. The problem has been acknowledged -- and thus must now be addressed. Racial equality will remain a dream as long as blacks and Hispanics learn less in school than whites and Asians. If black youngsters remain second-class students, they will be second-class citizens -- a racially identifiable and enduring group of have-nots." -- Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom in"No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning"

About Stephan Thernstrom

Basic Facts

Teaching Positions:
Winthrop Professor of History, Harvard University, 1981Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute, 1999Chairman, History of American Civilization Program, Harvard University, 1985-1992 Director, Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, Harvard University, 1980-83, 1986-87;
Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, University of Cambridge, 1978-79;
Professorial Fellow, Trinity College, 1978-79;
Professor of History, Harvard University, 1973-8l;
Professor of History, UCLA, 1969-73;
Senior Associate, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, UCLA, 1969-73;
Associate Professor of History, Brandeis University, 1967-69;
Assistant Professor of History, Harvard University, 1966-67;
Instructor, Harvard-Yale-Columbia Intensive Summer Studies Program Summer, 1966;
Research Member, M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, 1962-69;
Instructor in History and Literature, Harvard University, 1962-65.

Area of Research:
Social, demographic, and economic history of America; 20th century Social History, immigration, race and ethnicity.

Education:
B.S. with highest honors, Northwestern University, 1956
A.M., History, Harvard University, 1958
Ph.D., History of American Civilization, Harvard University, 1962

Major Publications:

Professor Thernstrom and his wife Abigail are writing a co-authored book that reconsiders the concept of de facto segregation.

Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:

Awards and Grants:

The Other Bostonians was awarded the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Harvard University Press Faculty Prize.
The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups received the American Historical Association's Waldo G. Leland Prize and the R.R. Hawkins Award of the Association of American Publishers
America in Black and White received the Caldwell Award from the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, and was named a"notable book of the year" by the"New York Times"
No Excuses was named one of"best books of 2003" by the"Los Angeles Times," and a 2003 and a"2003 Notable Book" by the American School Board Journal." No Excuses and were honored with the Peter Shaw Award from the National Association of Scholars. Research grant, John M. Olin Foundation, 1998-99;
John M. Olin Fellow, 1992-93;
Research grant, Smith Richardson Foundation, 1990-92;
Research grant, Rockefeller Foundation, 1975-80;
Research grant, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1975-1980;
John S. Guggenheim Fellow, 1969-70;
Research grant, Mathematical Social Science Board, 1965-68;
American Council of Learned Societies Fellow for Computer-Oriented Research in the Humanities, 1965-66;
Research grant, American Philosophical Society, 1964-65;
Samuel S. Stouffer Fellow, Joint Center for Urban Studies, 1961-62;
Frederick Sheldon Travelling Fellow, 1959-60;
Woodrow Wilson Fellow, 1956-57;

Additional Info:

Thernstrom's professional activities include: National Council on the Humanities, 2002;
Society of American Historians Editorial Board, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1970; Editorial Board, Journal of Family History, 1976; Editorial Board, Journal of American Ethnic History, 1981-97; Editorial Board, Labor History, 1970-75;
Co-editor, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History book series, Cambridge University Press, 1980;
Co-editor, Harvard Studies in Urban History series, Harvard University Press, 1972;
Co-editor, Documentary History of American Cities series, New Viewpoints Press, 1975-78;
Co-editor, Perspectives in American History, 2nd series, 1984-86;
Committee Member, Citizens' Initiative on Race and Ethnicity, 1999-2001;
Board of Directors, National Association of Scholars, 1990-97;
Board of Advisors, National Association of Scholars, 1997;
Consultant, U.S. Civil Rights Commission studies of"The Economic Progress of Black Men in America" and"The Economic Status of Americans of Asian Descent";
Panel Member, Committee to Review National Standards in U.S. History, Council on ' Basic Education, 1995;
Planning Committee, National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1994 Assessment in U.S. History Textbook Advisory Committee, Education for Democracy Project, 1986-88;
History Area Committee, Foundations of Literacy Project, National Assessment of Learning, 1985-87;
Executive Board, Immigration History Society, 1983-88;
Board of Directors, Social Science Research Council, 1977-78.