Born: February 27, 1888
Died: October 30, 1965
Ohio connection: Birth
Xenia
Arthur Meier Schlesinger was born in Xenia, Ohio, on February 27, 1888, the son of a first-generation immigrant. Schlesinger graduated in 1910 from Ohio State University in Columbus. During his stay at Ohio State, he married Elizabeth Bancroft; and their son, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., became famous as an historian and also as part of President John F. Kennedy’s intellectual group.
Schlesinger received his PhD from Columbia University in New York in 1918. As a graduate student at Columbia, Schlesinger was influenced by Herbert Levi Osgood and Charles A. Beard. Schlesinger began teaching at Ohio State in 1912 and finished his dissertation in 1917. The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776 was published in 1918. Schlesinger moved to Iowa City, Iowa, to become the chairman of the history department at the University of Iowa. There, Schlesinger introduced new courses on American social and cultural history. His course “New Viewpoints in American History” presented his ideas toward emphasizing social and cultural aspects of American society as well as the political. New Viewpoints in American History was published as a book of essays in 1922. Schlesinger joined the faculty at Harvard University as a visiting professor of history in 1924 and became the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History in 1939.
One of Schlesinger’s major contributions to scholarship is the 13-volume series A History of American Life. Volumes 1-4 were published in 1927 with Dixon Ryan Fox serving as co-editor. The series, which was an original attempt to portray the everyday life of ordinary people, was completed in 1948. Schlesinger’s own contribution to the series was The Rise of the City, 1878-1898 (1933). Schlesinger’s other books include Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (1946), Paths to the Present (1949), The American As Reformer (1950), and the autobiography In Retrospect: The History of a Historian (1963). Schlesinger retired from Harvard in 1954, becoming the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History Emeritus.
After a brief illness, Arthur M. Schlesinger died at Peter Bent Bingham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1965 at the age of 77.
Additional Resources
Internet Archive: New Viewpoints in American History (1922)