Oscar Handlin [1] was an
American historian. As a professor of history at
Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote
social and
ethnic history. Handlin won the
Pulitzer Prize for History in 1952 with
The Uprooted.
[2][3]
Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was said to "have played an
important role" in abolishing a discriminatory immigration quota system
in the U.S.
[4]\
(September 29, 1915 in
Brooklyn,
New York – September 20, 2011 in
Cambridge,
Massachusetts)
Biography
Handlin was born in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of three children
of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His mother, the former, Ida Yanowitz, came
to the United States in 1904 and worked in the garment industry. His
father, Joseph, came to America in 1913 after attending a commercial
college in the Ukraine and later being stationed in Harbin, China as a
soldier during the Russo-Japanese war. Handlin's parents were
passionately devoted to literature and the life of the mind. Their
experience of religious persecution in Czarist Russia made them fiercely
devoted to democracy and social justice (Handlin was a proto-"red
diaper baby.") The couple owned a grocery store, the success of which
along with real estate investments enabled them to send their children —
Oscar, Nathan and Sarah — to Harvard.
[5]
In 1934, Handlin graduated from
Brooklyn College and received a
M.A. from Harvard University one year later. Between 1936 and 1938, he taught history at Brooklyn College.
[6] In 1940, he received his
PhD from Harvard, where he studied with
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.[7]
During his time as a graduate student at Harvard, he was denied the
position of Vice President in the Henry Adams Club for being Jewish.
[8] Along with Dr. Schlesinger, he was among the first Jewish scholars appointed to full professorship at Harvard.
[9]
His work centered around the topic of immigrants in the U.S., and their influence on culture.
[7] Handlin taught at Harvard from 1939 to 1986.
Handlin co-authored several books with his first wife, historian Mary
Flug. The couple had three children, Joanna Handlin Smith, who later
became an expert in Chinese history and literature; David Handlin, an
architect; and Ruth Handlin Manley, a social worker. Mary Flug Handlin
died in 1976. Oscar Handlin later married historian Lilian Bombach. A
man of few words outside the lecture room, Handlin made every word
count. He was possessed of a sardonic wit honed by his love of the
novels of
James Branch Cabell, the operettas of
Gilbert & Sullivan and the cartoons of
Al Capp who was a family friend.
[10]
He died in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Administrator
Handlin was very active as a scholarly organizer and administrator.
In the Harvard history department he helped create the Center for the
Study of the History of Liberty in America and directed it 1958-67; he
also chaired the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History
from 1965 to 1973. From 1962 to 1966, he was a top official of the
United States Board of Foreign Scholarships, which gives out
Fulbright scholarships). He served on the board of overseers of
Brandeis University and was a trustee of the
New York Public Library. He was Harvard's head librarian from 1979 to 1984 and acting director of the
Harvard University Press in 1972.
[11]
Positions
Immigration
Among Handlin's many important contributions was his pioneering work on immigration to America. In his Pulitzer Prize winning
The Uprooted
(1951), he opens with the declaration: "Once I thought to write a
history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the
immigrants
were American history."
[12]
In the process, Handlin laid the ground for study of immigration by the
succeeding generation of historians, even though many of them would
dispute his immigrant archetype of a peasant guided primarily by
religious conviction, having no familiarity with wage work or urban
settings, and having experienced migration first and foremost as
alienation from family, community, and tradition.
[13]
The
American Journal of Sociology described Handlin's first book,
Boston's Immigrants
(1941), as "the first historical case study of the impact of immigrants
upon a particular society and the adjustment of the immigrants to that
society. The writer has opened a new field for historical research and
has also made a significant contribution to the literature of race and
culture contacts."
[14]
Handlin is viewed as one of the most prolific and influential
American historians of the twentieth century. As an American historian
and educator, he was noted for his in depth examination of American
immigration history, ethnic history and social history. His dissertation
(1941) was published as
Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1865: A Study in Acculturation.
The book was highly regarded for its innovative research on
sociological concepts and census data; in 1941, the book won the
prestigious Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association as
outstanding historical work published by a young scholar.
By the late 1950s Oscar Handlin was publishing a book nearly every
year, with works in the fields of civil rights, liberty, ethnicity,
urban history, the history of education, foreign affairs, migration,
biography, adolescence, even a book of poetry. Sometimes he wrote
collaboratively with Mary Flug Handlin and, after her death in 1976 and
his second marriage a year later, with Lilian Handlin. In the 1960s,
Handlin produced 11 books, wrote a monthly column for the Atlantic
Monthly, directed the Center for the Study of Liberty in America, helped
manage a commercial television station in Boston, chaired a board that
oversaw Fulbright Scholarship awards— in addition to his teaching duties
at Harvard. From 1979 to 1983, he was director of the Harvard
University Library. He also edited a 42-volume collection of books on
subjects relating to immigration and ethnicity, The American Immigration
Collection (1969). During the next three decades, Handlin wrote 12 more
books, many on the subject of liberty, and edited at least 20
biographies. He continued his work with immigrants with From the Outer
World (1997), which collected the travel accounts of visitors to the
United States from non-European countries.
[5]
American slavery
Oscar Handlin argued that racism was a by-product of slavery, and
that the main focus was on the fact that slaves, like indentured
servants, were regarded as inferior because of their status, not
necessarily because of their race.
[15]
Bibliography
- Boston's Immigrants, 1790–1865 (1941, rev. and enl. ed. 1959)
- Commonwealth (1947, together with his wife, Mary Flug Handlin)
- The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (1951, 2d enl. ed. 1973)
- Adventure in Freedom; 300 Years of Jewish Life in America (1954)
- Chance or Destiny: Turning Points in American History (1955), Little, Brown, & Co.
- Race and Nationality in American Life (1957)
- Al Smith and His America (1958)
- The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (1959)
- The Dimensions of Liberty (1961)
- The Americans: A New History of the People of the United States (1963)
- A Continuing Task: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1914—1964 (1964)
- Occasions for Love, and Other Essays at Recollection (Poetry, 1977)
- Truth In History (1979)
- From the Outer World (1997, with Lilian Handlin)
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