22 Facts About Bruce Mazlish

Bruce Mazlish was an American historian who was a professor in the Department of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bruce Mazlish's work focused on historiography and philosophy of history, history of science and technology, artificial intelligence, history of the social sciences, the two cultures and bridging the humanities and sciences, revolution, psychohistory, history of globalization and the history of global citizenship.

Bruce Mazlish worked to build the latter two fields of inquiry into a public intellectual movement, through initiatives such as the New Global History conferences.

Bruce Mazlish was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923.

Bruce Mazlish married Lee Reuben in 1919, and had three children, of whom Bruce was the middle, with an older brother Robert and a younger sister, Elaine.

Bruce Mazlish attended local public primary schools in Brooklyn, and then elected to go to Boys High School, which drew its students on a city-wide basis.

Bruce Mazlish worked as a journalist at The Washington Daily News for half of a year, spent a year with his wife in Mexico working on a novel, and then worked at a third-rate prep school, teaching English and History.

Bruce Mazlish became full Professor in the MIT History Department in 1965.

Bruce Mazlish was an editor of, and contributor to, several collected volumes, and the author of over two dozen books, as well as several dozen more articles and reviews in over two dozen peer-reviewed journals in addition to various periodicals.

Bruce Mazlish wrote psychohistorical biographies on Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and James and John Stuart Mill.

Bruce Mazlish's articles appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as History and Theory, American Historical Review, Historically Speaking, and New Global Studies, as well as periodicals for a more general audience, including Book Review Digest, Center Magazine, Encounter, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Magazine, and The Wilson Quarterly.

Bruce Mazlish was substantively involved in the major ongoing activity of the Toynbee Foundation, the New Global History Initiative, which organized several international conferences and since 2007 has published the New Global Studies Journal.

Bruce Mazlish was one of the editors, along with Nayan Chanda, Akira Iriye, Saskia Sassen, and Kenneth Weisbrode.

Bruce Mazlish was one of the founding members of the Wellfleet Psychohistory Group.

In 2004, the journal Historically Speaking, on the occasion of an interview with Bruce Mazlish, conducted by its editor, Donald Yerxa, described him as "identified with several seemingly disparate intellectual pursuits", including psychohistory, the history of the social sciences, and the new field of "global history", which he was then helping to shape.

Bruce Mazlish was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967.

The academy funded a project examining the feasibility of psychohistory; Bruce Mazlish was a primary investigator, along with Erik Erikson, Philip Rieff, Robert Lifton, and others.

From 1974 to 1979, Bruce Mazlish served as Head of MIT's Department of Humanities.

Bruce Mazlish served on the Board of Trustees, and as President, of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, which is an affiliated society of the American Historical Association, and sponsors one session at the Association's annual meeting, when the prize is awarded.

Bruce Mazlish was married to Neva Goodwin, daughter of David Rockefeller, an economist and co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University, with whom he published and edited several works.

Bruce Mazlish had two children from his first marriage, Cordelia and Peter Shaw, two from his second, Anthony and Jared Mazlish, and two stepchildren, David and Miranda Kaiser.

Bruce Mazlish passed on November 27,2016, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was eulogized in The New York Times, by several at the Toynbee Prize Foundation, by MIT News, and at an MIT Memorial service.