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New York Times
05-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Histories of Native America and the Port of Los Angeles Win Bancroft Prize
A sweeping history of Native Americans and a study of the creation of the port of Los Angeles in the 19th century have won this year's Bancroft Prize, one of the most distinguished honors for scholars of American history. Kathleen DuVal's 'Native Nations: A Millennium in North America,' published by Random House, was described by the prize jurors as 'a seamless panorama of 1,000 years of American history,' which draws on both written records and Native oral histories to tie together the stories of the more than 500 Indigenous nations who inhabit what is now the United States. 'By crafting a historical narrative that introduces readers to a new national story,' the jurors write, 'DuVal helps explain the Indigenous cultural and political renaissance of our own age.' DuVal, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is part of a new wave of scholars of Native America, who challenge the idea that the defeat of Indigenous people was inevitable, and who emphasize their resilience and continued cultural vitality. Hamilton Cain, reviewing the 752-page volume in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, called it 'intimate yet comprehensive,' adding, 'No single volume can adequately depict the gamut of Indigenous cultures, but DuVal's comes close.' The second winner, James Tejani's 'A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America,' published by W.W. Norton, reconstructs the complex interactions between 19th-century engineers, merchants, military, Native tribes and others that turned the tiny San Pedro estuary into what is today the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere. 'By returning the attention of historians to infrastructure, material objects, and logistics,' the Bancroft jurors wrote, 'Tejani opens our eyes to a new way of thinking about the trans-Mississippi West.' Tejani, an associate professor at California State University, grew up near San Pedro Bay, and occasionally weaves personal observations into the history. Julia Flynn Siler, reviewing the book in The Wall Street Journal, described it as packed with 'detailed, careful scholarship' that turns the story into 'a lens through which to view American expansionism.' The prize, which awards $10,000 to each winner, was created in 1948 by the trustees of Columbia University, with a bequest from the historian Frederic Bancroft. Entries — 249 this year — are evaluated for 'scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation,' according to the prize announcement.
Boston Globe
30-01-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
William E. Leuchtenburg, scholar of FDR and the presidency, dies at 102
Like his contemporaries Richard Hofstadter, Edmund S. Morgan, John M. Blum, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. — a lifelong friend — Dr. Leuchtenburg shaped America's conception of its past during the prosperous 1950s and '60s. His orientation was broadly liberal and internationalist, though he anticipated and responded to criticisms of Roosevelt from the New Left and from the ascendant conservative movement. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The work generally regarded as his masterpiece is 'Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940,' published in 1963, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize by Columbia University and the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians. Advertisement 'He took an office which had lost much of its prestige and power in the previous 12 years and gave it an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done,' Dr. Leuchtenburg wrote, chronicling the enormous growth of the federal government under Franklin Roosevelt, his innovative use of radio and newspaper reporters to communicate his message, and his ability to make Americans feel 'the kind of trust they would normally express for a warm and understanding father who comforted them in their grief or safeguarded them from harm.' Dr. Leuchtenburg did not brush aside the many problems of the New Deal: It failed to crush unemployment — only America's entry into World War II in 1941 would do that — and it favored farmers, industrial workers, and technocrats while excluding powerless groups including sharecroppers, the urban poor, and most African Americans. But he found that the New Deal — with its spirit of experimentation and pragmatism, and its orientation away from 19th-century individualism and toward collective action — helped save capitalism, and perhaps democracy itself. Advertisement Central to that achievement was Roosevelt. 'Roosevelt's importance lay not in his talents as a campaigner or a manipulator,' Dr. Leuchtenburg wrote. 'It lay rather in his ability to arouse the country and, more specifically, the men who served under him, by his breezy encouragement of experimentation, by his hopefulness, and — a word that would have embarrassed some of his lieutenants — by his idealism.' His other major books include 'The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932' (1958), which traces the United States' transformation from an agrarian, moralistic, isolationist nation into an industrial, liberal, and engaged power involved in foreign affairs despite itself; and 'The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt' (1995), about the events surrounding the 1937 constitutional crisis set off by Roosevelt's effort to expand the court to as many as 15 justices. That plan was ultimately defeated, but only after the court shifted its jurisprudence to be more open to legislation regulating business activities. William Edward Leuchtenburg was born in New York City on Sept. 28, 1922. His father, William, was a German American post office worker; his mother, Lauretta C. (McNamara) Leuchtenburg, had emigrated from Ireland as an infant. The younger William's fascination with Washington came early: At age 12, he rode a Greyhound bus for nine hours to visit the White House, the Capitol, and the recently built Supreme Court building. He attended Cornell University, partly on scholarships he had won. At Cornell, he got a job cleaning test tubes for 30 cents an hour (a little under $7 today), via the National Youth Administration, part of the alphabet soup of agencies established under the New Deal. After graduating in 1943, he enrolled in Columbia, where he received his doctorate in 1951. Advertisement Dr. Leuchtenburg taught for three decades at Columbia and then for two more at the University of North Carolina before he was given emeritus status there. He was never confined to the ivory tower. He was a New England field representative from 1945 to 1946 for a national council seeking to permanently ban racial discrimination in federal employment; served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1952; and joined other historians in marching to Montgomery, Ala., with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. He was active in Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal and anti-communist group that Eleanor Roosevelt helped found. He also found time to serve as an election analyst for NBC News, first with anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, then with John Chancellor. And he joined lawsuits to stop President Nixon from destroying the Watergate tapes and to keep Secretary of State Henry Kissinger from sequestering transcripts of official phone conversations. Dr. Leuchtenburg selected the quotations carved into the granite of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, which opened in 1997. He contributed to Ken Burns's documentaries on Prohibition, the Civil War and baseball. 'I'm going to cry talking about it, but it's just this gigantic and unfillable hole,' Burns said of Dr. Leuchtenburg's death. 'He taught us well, though. He's imparted not just facts, but attitudes and relationships and methodologies that we'll save.' Advertisement Dr. Leuchtenburg's first marriage, to Jean McIntire, ended in divorce. He married Jean Anne Williams in the mid-1980s. In addition to his wife, he leaves three sons from his first marriage, Christopher, Joshua, and Thomas; a stepson, Christopher K. Williams; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Dr. Leuchtenburg published 'In the Shadow of FDR,' about Roosevelt's legacy for future presidents, in 1983, and he updated the book several times, taking it up to the administration of President Barack Obama. His last book, 'Patriot Presidents: From George Washington to John Quincy Adams,' came out in July. He found that those successors did not quite match up. 'A millworker in South Carolina once said, 'Franklin Roosevelt is the only president we've ever had who understands that my boss is a son of a gun,'' Dr. Leuchtenburg said in an interview with C-SPAN in 2010, during the Obama administration. 'Obama has for some reason not been able to convey that same sense, that he knows what it is to be down and out, to be unemployed month after month after month with no prospect in sight.' He was also critical of President Trump in early 2017, only weeks after Trump's inauguration. 'We really have no precedent for a chief executive with this sort of temperament — so careless about his statements, so quick to take offense,' Dr. Leuchtenburg told the North Carolina website NC Newsline. 'There is concern not just here at home but abroad, as I know from letters I'm getting from historians, particularly in Europe. There is great alarm about how irresponsible the man seems.' 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Boston Globe
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Stephan Thernstrom, historian and affirmative-action foe, dies at 90
Advertisement Beginning with his first book, 'Poverty and Progress' (1964), Dr. Thernstrom helped pioneer the use of quantitative methods in American history, relying on property records, census manuscripts, bank statements, and archival newspapers to craft a nuanced portrait of working men in 19th-century Newburyport. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He was awarded the Bancroft Prize, a top US history honor, and was later a National Book Award finalist for 'The Other Bostonians' (1973), in which he applied his analytical methods to 20th-century Boston, tracing the upward mobility of varying ethnic groups while exploring the role that prejudice and discrimination played in hindering progress. 'Most studies in quantitative history ought to be reviewed in cipher, just to give the reader an idea of the agonizing prose he can expect. Not so Stephan Thernstrom's work,' editor and publisher Ivan R. Dee wrote in a review for The New York Times. 'He knows how to write a sentence, appreciates the limitations of his infant historical technique, and deals with crucial questions instead of dazzling us with computerized footwork.' Although he continued to publish well-received historical volumes, Dr. Thernstrom became best known for 'America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible' (1997), a 700-page exploration of American race relations that he co-wrote with his wife. A product of seven years of research and writing, the book combined dispassionate historical analysis with passages of fiery rhetoric, arguing that African Americans had made significant — and, in the Thernstroms' view, often overlooked — gains since the Jim Crow era, even as opportunity gaps persisted. Advertisement Dr. Thernstrom and his wife favored 'color-blind' fixes, arguing that the use of racial preferences in college admissions and job applications was divisive and largely ineffective. They were especially critical of what they regarded as a politically correct dynamic of 'black anger' and 'white surrender,' in which affirmative-action supporters embraced 'policies built on deference to black victimization through which they can display their racial virtue.' The book made the Thernstroms intellectual heroes for many conservatives, even as it dismayed liberal friends who remembered the couple's earlier years as left-leaning activists. While in graduate school, Dr. Thernstrom immersed himself in Marxist theory, earnestly underlining his copy of 'Das Kapital' and protesting the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. His wife, a former red-diaper baby, had sung along with Pete Seeger as a girl and attended the Little Red School House in New York. She and Dr. Thernstrom were planning to register Black voters in the South in 1964 when Abigail became pregnant with their first child. Around that time, Dr. Thernstrom backed a bill in the Massachusetts State House to eliminate references to race on college admissions applications. 'That seemed to me then absolutely the ideal — you admit people without any reference to their race,' he recalled in a 1998 interview with the Times. 'And it still seems to be the ideal to me. What's different is that it was a radical idea in 1963, and now it's a so-called conservative idea.' Disillusioned by the rise of identity politics, he and his wife began voting for Republican presidential candidates for the first time in the 1990s. They joined conservative intellectuals at the White House in 1997, sparring with President Clinton in an Oval Office debate about race and affirmative action, and later championed alternative approaches to education, arguing on behalf of charter schools and vouchers in opinion essays and a 2003 book, 'No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.' Advertisement Critics said the Thernstroms could be overly reductive and minimized the problems faced by Black Americans. 'Here are two white people who are essentially lecturing Black Americans, saying: 'What are you complaining about? Stop your griping. Here are the data. You're better off than ever before,'' political scientist Andrew Hacker told the Times in 1998. Dr. Thernstrom brushed off the criticism, standing by his empirical findings. A self-described 'lone wolf,' he let his wife take the lead in promoting their work (she 'is fonder of talking than I am,' he told the American Prospect), although he joined her in insisting that they had not undergone any kind of radical political transformation in the years leading up to their first book. 'We haven't changed,' he told The Washington Post after it was published. 'It is that liberalism has evolved.' Stephan Albert Thernstrom was born in Port Huron, Mich., on Nov. 5, 1934. An only child, he grew up in Battle Creek, in southern Michigan, and was raised in the Church of Christ, Scientist. He later adopted a more secular, left-leaning view of the world over the objections of his father, who worked for a railroad company. 'If you're a communist,' he recalled his father telling him, 'I don't want you in my house.' Early on, there were few signs that Dr. Thernstrom had a future in academia. He skipped classes in elementary and middle school and was assigned to a vocational track in high school. But his mother, a homemaker, managed to persuade administrators to reconsider, and Dr. Thernstrom went on to find academic success after falling in love with debate and Latin, which his family described as 'the first school subject he'd found intellectually challenging.' Advertisement After graduating from Northwestern University in 1956, he enrolled in the history PhD program at Harvard. Dr. Thernstrom studied under Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Handlin, a scholar of American immigration who introduced him to 'the idea that history wasn't just about battles and generals and presidents — that it could really just be the story of ordinary people, like the family that he came from,' his daughter, Melanie, said in a phone interview. At a talk by investigative journalist I.F. Stone, Dr. Thernstrom met Abigail Mann, a fellow Harvard graduate student who was pursuing a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies. (She soon switched to government.) They married about six weeks later, in 1959. Dr. Thernstrom received his doctorate in 1962. He taught at Brandeis University and UCLA, returned to Harvard in 1974 as a professor, and edited books including the 'Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups' (1980), a 1,080-page reference work. He also served as an expert witness in court cases addressing claims of racial discrimination. In 1988, students accused him of making racially insensitive remarks in his lectures, which he denied. He was cleared of wrongdoing but felt isolated by university administrations in the episode, which conservative activists cited 'as an example of political correctness run amok,' according to a profile in the Post. Advertisement Dr. Thernstrom retired from teaching in 2008, not long after he moved to McLean, Va., with his wife. She served as the vice chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights and worked at conservative think tanks before her death in 2020, at 83. In addition to their daughter, Melanie, an author and journalist, Dr. Thernstrom leaves a son, Samuel Thernstrom, the founder of a nonprofit organization that promotes alternative energy technologies; and four grandchildren. Politically, Dr. Thernstrom remained difficult to classify. His daughter said he took issue with aspects of both the left and the right, and lamented the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in recent years. 'He would be so upset,' Melanie Thernstrom said, 'about the idea of rolling back birthright citizenship,' which President Trump is attempting to end through executive order. 'He really did believe the strength of America came from the melting pot, from different ethnic groups coming together.'
New York Times
29-01-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
William E. Leuchtenburg, Scholar of F.D.R. and the Presidency, Dies at 102
William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian whose books cemented the place of Franklin D. Roosevelt among the greatest American presidents, died on Tuesday at his home in Chapel Hill, NC. He was 102. His death was confirmed by his friend and colleague John F. Kasson. A prolific scholar whose writings stretched across eight decades — his first book, on the politics of flood control, appeared in 1953, and his final one, on the first six presidents of the United States, was published last year — Mr. Leuchtenburg helped Americans make sense of the head-spinning changes that had transformed their nation and the world within living memory. Like his contemporaries Richard Hofstadter, Edmund S. Morgan, John M. Blum and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. — a lifelong friend — Mr. Leuchtenburg shaped America's conception of its past during the prosperous 1950s and '60s. His orientation was broadly liberal and internationalist, though he anticipated and responded to criticisms of Roosevelt from the New Left and from the ascendant conservative movement. The work generally regarded as his masterpiece is 'Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940,' published in 1963, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize by Columbia University and the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians. 'He took an office which had lost much of its prestige and power in the previous 12 years and gave it an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done,' Mr. Leuchtenburg wrote, chronicling the enormous growth of the federal government under Franklin Roosevelt, his innovative use of radio and newspaper reporters to communicate his message, and his ability to make Americans feel 'the kind of trust they would normally express for a warm and understanding father who comforted them in their grief or safeguarded them from harm.' Mr. Leuchtenburg did not brush aside the many problems of the New Deal: It failed to crush unemployment — only America's entry into World War II in 1941 would do that — and it favored farmers, industrial workers and technocrats while excluding powerless groups like sharecroppers, urban slum dwellers and most African Americans. But he found that the New Deal — with its spirit of experimentation and pragmatism, and its orientation away from 19th-century individualism and toward collective action — helped save capitalism, and perhaps democracy itself. Central to that achievement was Roosevelt. 'Roosevelt's importance lay not in his talents as a campaigner or a manipulator,' Mr. Leuchtenburg wrote. 'It lay rather in his ability to arouse the country and, more specifically, the men who served under him, by his breezy encouragement of experimentation, by his hopefulness, and — a word that would have embarrassed some of his lieutenants — by his idealism.' His other major books include 'The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932' (1958), which traces the United States' transformation from an agrarian, moralistic, isolationist nation into an industrial, liberal and engaged power involved in foreign affairs in spite of itself; and 'The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt' (1995), about the events surrounding the 1937 constitutional crisis set off by Roosevelt's effort to expand the court to as many as 15 justices. That plan was ultimately defeated, but only after the court shifted its jurisprudence to be more open to legislation regulating business activities. William Edward Leuchtenburg was born in New York City — in Ridgewood, which straddles the Brooklyn-Queens border — on Sept. 28, 1922. His father, William, was a German American post office worker; his mother, Lauretta C. (McNamara) Leuchtenburg, had immigrated from Ireland as an infant. The younger William's fascination with Washington came early: At age 12, he rode a Greyhound bus for nine hours to visit the White House, the Capitol and the recently built Supreme Court building. Mr. Leuchtenburg grew up in several Queens neighborhoods — Woodhaven, Astoria, Woodside and Elmhurst — and graduated from Newtown High School, in Elmhurst, in 1939. He attended Cornell University, partly on scholarships he had won. At Cornell, he got a job cleaning test tubes for 30 cents an hour (a little under $7 today), via the National Youth Administration, part of the alphabet soup of agencies established under the New Deal. After graduating in 1943, he enrolled in Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951. Mr. Leuchtenburg taught for three decades at Columbia and then for two more at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was an emeritus professor at his death. He was never confined to the ivory tower. He was a New England field representative from 1945 to 1946 for a national council seeking to permanently ban racial discrimination in federal employment; served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1952; and joined other historians in marching to Montgomery, Ala., with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. He was active in Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal and anti-communist group that Eleanor Roosevelt helped found. He also found time to serve as an election analyst for NBC News, first with the anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, then with John Chancellor. And he joined lawsuits to stop President Richard M. Nixon from destroying the Watergate tapes and to keep Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger from sequestering transcripts of official phone conversations. In 1987, Mr. Leuchtenburg testified against Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. He contributed to Ken Burns's documentaries on the Civil War and baseball, and he selected the quotations carved into the granite of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, which opened in 1997. Mr. Leuchtenburg's first marriage, to Jean McIntire, ended in divorce. He married Jean Anne Williams in the mid-1980s. She survives, as do three sons from his first marriage, Christopher, Joshua and Thomas, along with several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Over his career, Mr. Leuchtenburg served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Historians and the American Historical Association. In his 1991 presidential address to the American Historical Association, he urged historians to engage with the public, but to do so carefully. 'When we do speak out, and we should choose those times wisely, we must take care to distinguish between doing so as historians and doing so simply as politically active citizens,' he said. 'Above all,' he added, 'we should take care not to create an atmosphere in the classroom in which views that diverge from our own cannot freely be voiced, and we should respect the rights of others in the profession to express beliefs contrary to our own or to remain silent.' Mr. Leuchtenburg published 'In the Shadow of F.D.R.,' about Roosevelt's legacy for future presidents, in 1983, and he updated the book several times, taking it up to the administration of President Barack Obama. His last book, 'Patriot Presidents: From George Washington to John Quincy Adams,' came out in July. 'No one before Roosevelt had so dominated the political culture of his day, if for no other reason than that no one before him had been in the White House for so long,' Mr. Leuchtenburg wrote, 'and in the process he created the expectation that the chief executive would be a primary shaper of his times — an expectation with which each of his successors has had to deal.' He found that those successors did not quite match up. 'A millworker in South Carolina once said, 'Franklin Roosevelt is the only president we've ever had who understands that my boss is a son of a gun,'' Mr. Leuchtenburg said in an interview with C-SPAN in 2010, during the Obama administration. 'Obama has for some reason not been able to convey that same sense, that he knows what it is to be down and out, to be unemployed month after month after month with no prospect in sight. Why he's not able to make that connection isn't clear to me.' He was also critical of President Trump in early 2017, only weeks after Mr. Trump's inauguration. 'We really have no precedent for a chief executive with this sort of temperament — so careless about his statements, so quick to take offense,' Mr. Leuchtenburg told the North Carolina website NC Newsline. 'There is concern not just here at home but abroad, as I know from letters I'm getting from historians, particularly in Europe. There is great alarm about how irresponsible the man seems.' He compared Mr. Trump to President Nixon, who was forced to resign in the wake of the Watergate crisis. 'Among other things,' he said, 'Nixon would sometimes espouse the 'madman theory.' That if he convinced his foes overseas that there's almost anything this man might do, they might be willing to make concessions.'
