25 Facts About Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century.

Richard Hofstadter was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

Richard Hofstadter was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Richard Hofstadter was raised as an Episcopalian, but later identified more with his Jewish roots.

In 1936, Richard Hofstadter entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where his advisor Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research.

From 1942 to 1946, Hofstadter taught history at the University of Maryland, where he became a close friend of the popular sociologist C Wright Mills and read extensively in the fields of sociology and psychology, absorbing ideas of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Sigmund Freud, and the Frankfurt School.

In 1946, Richard Hofstadter joined Columbia University's faculty, and in 1959 he succeeded Allan Nevins as the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, where he played a major role in directing Ph.

Richard Hofstadter later complained that this remark in a hastily written preface requested by the editor had been the reason for "lumping him" unfairly into the category of "consensus historians" like Boorstin, who celebrated this kind of ideological consensus as an achievement, whereas Richard Hofstadter deplored it.

Richard Hofstadter expressed his dislike of the term consensus historian several times, and criticized Boorstin for overusing the consensus and ignoring the essential conflicts in history.

Richard Hofstadter rejected Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of exclusively economically motivated group conflicts and financial interests of politicians.

Richard Hofstadter thought that most of the periods of US history, except the Civil War, could be fully understood only by taking into account an implicit consensus, shared by all groups across the conflict lines.

Richard Hofstadter criticized the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington because they had.

In writing the book, Hofstadter was influenced by literary figures as well as historians: two key influences on him were the critic Edmund Wilson and the novelist F Scott Fitzgerald.

Richard Hofstadter's style was so powerful and engrossing that professors kept assigning the book long after scholars had revised or rejected its main points.

Richard Hofstadter explored subconscious motives such as social status anxiety, anti-intellectualism, irrational fear, and paranoia as they propel political discourse and action in politics.

The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington systematically analyzes and criticizes the intellectual foundations and historical validity of Beard's historiography and revealed Richard Hofstadter's increasing inclination toward neoconservatism.

Richard Hofstadter artfully employed their explicit scholarly meanings and their informal prejudicial connotations.

Richard Hofstadter had been reluctant to join, knowing the orthodoxy it imposed on intellectuals, telling them what to believe and what to write.

Richard Hofstadter specifically responded to Beard's social-conflict model of US history, which emphasized the struggle among competing economic groups and discounted abstract political rhetoric that rarely translated into action.

Richard Hofstadter planned to write a three-volume history of American society.

Richard Hofstadter died of leukemia on October 24,1970, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, at age 54.

Richard Hofstadter showed more interest in his research than in his teaching.

Richard Hofstadter directed more than 100 finished doctoral dissertations but gave his graduate students only cursory attention; he believed this academic latitude enabled them to find their own models of history.

Some, such as Eric McKitrick and Stanley Elkins, were more conservative than he; Richard Hofstadter had few disciples and founded no school of history writing.

Richard Hofstadter taught American history at Brooklyn College in the 1960s.