Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr.

▪ 2008

Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger 

      American historian, educator, and public official

born Oct. 15, 1917 , Columbus, Ohio

died Feb. 28, 2007 , New York, N.Y.

reinterpreted the American era of Jacksonian democracy in terms of its cultural, social, and economic aspects as well as its strictly political dimensions in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson (1946). Schlesinger's major historical work was The Age of Roosevelt, whose three separate volumes were entitled The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (1957), The Coming of the New Deal (1958), and The Politics of Upheaval (1960). In these books he described and narrated Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal from a sympathetic standpoint. Schlesinger graduated from Harvard University in 1938, and he achieved initial notice with his biography Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress (1939). After serving in the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, he became a professor of history at his alma mater in 1946, teaching there until 1961. Throughout his life Schlesinger was active in liberal politics. He was an adviser to Adlai Stevenson and subsequently to John F. Kennedy during their presidential campaigns, and the latter appointed Schlesinger a special assistant for Latin American affairs. Schlesinger's study of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965), also won a Pulitzer Prize. In 1966 he began teaching history at the City University of New York, becoming professor emeritus in 1994. His other books included The Bitter Heritage (1967), The Imperial Presidency (1973), Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), and War and the American Presidency (2004), which decried the foreign policy of Pres. George W. Bush.

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