23 Facts About Merle Curti

Merle Eugene Curti was a leading American historian, who taught many graduate students at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin, and was a leader in developing the fields of social history and intellectual history.

Merle Curti was a pioneer in peace studies, intellectual history, and social history, and helped develop quantitative methods based on census samples as a tool in historical research.

Merle Curti's parents were John Eugene Curti, an immigrant from Switzerland, and Alice Hunt, a Yankee from Vermont.

Merle Curti then spent a year studying in France where he met Margaret Wooster who had a Ph.

Merle Curti taught at Beloit College, Smith College, and Columbia University, then in 1942 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he taught for 25 years.

Merle Curti taught in Japan, Australia, and India, and lectured throughout Europe.

Merle Curti developed his global vision through travels; he taught in Japan, Australia and India for two years.

Merle Curti left the Episcopal faith of his boyhood for Unitarianism.

Merle Curti turned his attention to intellectual history, and helped to establish that field as a distinct academic discipline.

In 1944, Merle Curti won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his masterwork, The Growth of American Thought.

Unlike Perry Miller at Harvard, who strongly influenced a new generation of intellectual historians, Merle Curti never delved too deeply into the internal history of ideas, preferring to link them to multiple external social and economic factors.

Merle Curti's book was not so much a history of American thought as a social history of American thought, with strong attention to the social and economic forces that shaped that thought from the bottom up.

Whereas the "old" social history comprised descriptions of everyday lifestyles, perhaps with a coverage of grass roots political movements, Merle Curti's "new" social history was a systematic examination of the entire population using statistics and social science methodologies.

In 1942, Merle Curti was called to the Frederick Jackson Turner Professorship of History at the University of Wisconsin, one of the nation's most influential centers of historical scholarship; he retired from the department in 1968.

The Wisconsin department of history was notorious for the angry feuds among the senior professors, which Merle Curti, mild-mannered and small of stature, completely ignored.

Merle Curti supervised 86 finished doctoral dissertations at Columbia and Wisconsin, including many who became well-known scholars: Richard Hofstadter on social Darwinism; John Higham on nativism; Bourke on community studies; Allen Davis on Progressivism and Jane Addams; and Roderick Nash on the environment.

Merle Curti allowed his students a free hand in content and methodology.

Merle Curti encouraged his students constantly, wrote highly detailed critiques of their chapters, protected them from intradepartmental feuds, helped them get funding, and found them jobs through the "old boys" network of which he was an accomplished maestro, writing hundreds of letters a month to friends and ex-students across the globe.

Merle Curti won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1944 for The Growth of American Thought.

Merle Curti was president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in 1952 and the American Historical Association in 1954.

Merle Curti was a co-founder of the American Studies Association.

Merle Curti served as the organization's vice-president in 1954 and 1955, and was asked to serve as president in 1956, but he declined the honor because he was going to be out of the country.

Merle Curti was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.