35 Facts About John Lukacs

John Adalbert Lukacs was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books.

On 22 July 1946, as it was becoming clear that Hungary would become a Communist state, John Lukacs fled to the United States.

John Lukacs found employment as a part-time assistant lecturer at Columbia University in New York City.

John Lukacs then relocated to Philadelphia, where in 1947 he began work as a history professor at Chestnut Hill College, a women's college at the time.

John Lukacs was a professor of history there until 1994 and chaired the history department from 1947 to 1974.

John Lukacs served as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Princeton University, La Salle University, Regent College in British Columbia, the University of Budapest, and Hanover College.

John Lukacs was a president of the American Catholic Historical Association and a member of both the Royal Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society.

John Lukacs saw populism as the primary threat to modern civilization.

John Lukacs identified populism as the essence of both Nazism and Communism, denying the existence of generic fascism and asserted that the differences between the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were greater than their similarities.

John Lukacs defends traditional Western civilization against what he sees as the leveling and debasing effects of mass culture.

An Anglophile, John Lukacs gives the highest historical importance to Winston Churchill.

John Lukacs considered Churchill to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, the savior not only of Great Britain but of Western civilization itself.

John Lukacs argues that Great Britain and by extension the British Empire could not defeat Germany by itself, and that winning required the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union.

John Lukacs observes that by inspiring the British people to resist German air attacks and to "never surrender" during the Battle of Britain in 1940, Churchill laid the groundwork for the subsequent victory of the Allies.

John Lukacs had strong isolationist beliefs and unusually for an anti-Communist emigre had "surprisingly critical views of the Cold War from a unique conservative perspective", being described as one of "anti-anticommunists among conservatives and their fellow travelers".

Likewise, John Lukacs was critical of American intervention abroad, and condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

From around 1977 onwards, John Lukacs became one of the leading critics of the British author David Irving, whom John Lukacs accused of engaging in unscholarly practices and having neo-Nazi sympathies.

John Lukacs commented that Irving had uncritically used personal remembrances by those who knew Adolf Hitler to present him in the most favorable light possible.

In John Lukacs's view, Hitler was a racist, nationalist, revolutionary, and populist.

John Lukacs criticizes Marxist and liberal historians who argue that the German working class were strongly anti-Nazi, and instead he argues that the exact opposite was the case.

John Lukacs denies that Hitler developed a belief in racial purity during his time in Vienna under the Habsburg monarchy.

Much influenced by Rainer Zitelmann's work, John Lukacs describes Hitler as a self-conscious, modernizing revolutionary.

John Lukacs argues that the reason Hitler gave for the invasion of Russia was the real one.

John Lukacs stated that Britain would not surrender because Winston Churchill held out the hope that the Soviet Union might enter the war on the Allied side and so Germany had to eliminate that hope; however, other historians have argued that the reason was just a pretext.

John Lukacs argues that Hitler's statement in August 1939 to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, the Swiss diplomat Carl Jacob Burckhardt, which Hillgruber cited as evidence of Hitler's anti-Soviet intentions, was part of an effort to intimidate Britain and France into abandoning Poland.

John Lukacs takes issue with Hillgruber's claim that the war against Britain was of "secondary" importance to Hitler compared to the war against the Soviet Union.

John Lukacs has been one of the critics of Viktor Suvorov, who has argued that Barbarossa was a "preventative war" forced upon Germany by Stalin, who according to Suvorov was planning to attack Germany later in the summer of 1941.

John Lukacs warns that the populism he perceives as ascendant in the United States renders it vulnerable to demagoguery.

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat is a continuation of his work on what John Lukacs considered the greatness of Churchill.

In 1953, John Lukacs married Helen Elizabeth Schofield, the daughter of a Philadelphia lawyer; the couple had two children.

John Lukacs married his second wife, Stephanie Harvey, in 1974.

From this marriage, John Lukacs had step-children; his second wife died in 2003.

John Lukacs married for a third time but his marriage to Pamela Hall ended in divorce.

John Lukacs resided in Schuylkill Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania and retained nearly 18,000 books in his home library.

John Lukacs died from congestive heart failure on May 6,2019, at his home in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.