Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters: A Selection From His Correspondence With Boccaccio and Other Friends, Designed to Illustrate ... Latin, Together With Historical Introductio
(Excerpt from Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man o...)
Excerpt from Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters: A Selection From His Correspondence With Boccaccio and Other Friends, Designed to Illustrate the Beginnings of the Renaissance; Translated From the Original Latin, Together With Historical Introductions and Notes
We have ourselves come to love the eager, independent, clear-sighted, sensitive soul through whose eyes we have followed the initial spiritual struggle of modern times; we would that others might learn to love him too.
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The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook (Classic Reprint)
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Excerpt from The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook
All of the essays in this volume, with the exception of the fourth, have been printed before, as addresses or contributions to periodicals. They have, however, not only been carefully revised, but have been ad justed so as to give as much coherence as possible to the collection. They all illustrate, each in its particular way, the conception of the new history developed in the first essay.
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Outlines Of European History: From The Opening Of The Eighteenth Century To The Present Day
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The Mind in the Making The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform
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Medieval and Modern Times: An Introduction to the History of Western Europe From the Dissolution of the Roman Empire to the Opening of the Great War of 1914
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History. A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University in the Series on Science, Philosophy and Art, January 15, 1908
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(1923. Robinson, an American historian and one of the foun...)
1923. Robinson, an American historian and one of the founders of the New School for Social Research of which he was the first director. Through his writings and lectures, in which he stressed the new history-the social, scientific, and intellectual progress of humanity rather than merely political happenings-he exerted an important influence on the study and teaching of history. Contents: On Mankind's General Indifference to Scientific Truth; The Dehumanizing of Science; How Scientific Discoveries have become a Matter of General Concern; Present Organized Opposition to the Scientific View of Man's Place in the Natural Order; On Science vs. Lore and the Current Hostility to a Scientific Attitude of Mind; The Problem of Humanizing Knowledge; and How is Scientific Knowledge to be Democratized? See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
('For me, I think James Harvey Robinson is going to be alm...)
'For me, I think James Harvey Robinson is going to be almost as important as was Huxley in my adolescence, and William James in later years. It is a cardinal book. I question whether in the long run people may not come to it, as making a new initiative into the world's thoughts and methods' From the Introduction by H.G.Wells
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James Harvey Robinson was born on 29 June 1863. He devoted many years teaching European history at Columbia University. He was an upholder of the idea of human-oriented education based on academic freedom, which was inspired by his fondness of the Renaissance and the French Revolution. He considered historical researches incomplete if they were not combined with data from social scientists, archeologist, anthropologists and ethnologists.
Background
James Harvey Robinson born in Bloomington, Illinois, on 29 June 1863, the son of James Harvey and Latricia Maria (Drake) Robinson. He was the third son and fifth of six children who survived infancy; two others died at an early age. His younger brother, Benjamin Lincoln Robinson, became a distinguished botanist and head of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard. On both his father's and mother's side Robinson's family line follows the characteristic course of the expansion of New England through upper New York state to the Old Northwest Territory. He was seventh in lineal descent from Isaac Robinson of Plymouth, son of the famous Dr. John Robinson, pastor of the Pilgrims at Leyden in Holland.
His father was born near Saratoga, New York, and settled in Bloomington in 1836, where he advanced from keeping a general store to a bank presidency.
His mother came to Bloomington with her father, a clergyman and small newspaper publisher, from Homer, New York, two years before her marriage in 1842.
Education
Though his father died when he was eleven, Robinson never knew economic difficulties and was able to pursue his later education secure in his own income.
From the grade schools and high school of Bloomington he went to the State Normal School at Normal, Illinois, where, in a brief stay, he laid the foundation for a lifetime interest in biology.
In 1884 he entered Harvard and graduated from it in 1887. He took his Bachelor of the Arts degree in 1887 and Master of Arts degree in 1888. According to Harry Elmer Barnes, he later recalled as having permanently influenced him at Harvard only William James; others have found in Harvard teaching, and notably in that of Ephraim Emerton, the origin of his interest in European history.
He went to Germany for his doctorate, following a fashion by then long established in American scholarship; after a semester at Strassburg, the Doctor of Philosophy came at Freiburg in 1890.
Robinson was given the honorary degree of Legum Doctor (Doctor of Law) by the University of Utah in 1922, that of Doctor of Humane Letters by Tufts College in 1924.
Career
After leaving the State Normal School Robinson spent a year in European travel, apparently trying to decide on a career. Returning to Bloomington, he worked as clerk in a store and then in the family bank before deciding in 1884 to enter Harvard.
From the time he entered Harvard, Robinson's career was pointed toward scholarship and writing.
He went to Germany for his doctorate and worked in Freiburg in 1890 with Hermann E. von Holst on an elaboration of his earlier Harvard master's essay, published as The Original and Derived Features of the Constitution of the United States of America (1890). From his German stay, however, he did get thorough apprenticeship in the craft of history and an initial grounding in a wide range of historical fields, from the medieval to the contemporary.
His last work in Germany, where he visited in Halle and Berlin after taking his doctorate, was The German Bundesrath (1891).
Robinson taught first at the University of Pennsylvania, from 1891 to 1895. He then went as professor of European history to Barnard College and Columbia University, the beginning of a long and fruitful career at Columbia which lasted until 1919. He taught both undergraduates and graduates, and in many fields--the Middle Ages, the Protestant Revolt, the Renaissance, the French Revolution--but the course for which he came to be best known among Columbia men was his general "History of the Intellectual Classes of Europe, " one of the great college courses of the time.
Robinson resigned from Columbia in the spring of 1919 to help found the New School for Social Research. It is not true, however, that he was forced out of Columbia, that his resignation was one more contribution to American academic martyrology. Robinson went to the New School because he believed that he could find there the wider opportunities denied him at Columbia by the very nature of the constituted system of higher education in the United States.
The New School, planned by Charles A. Beard, John Dewey, Alvin Johnson, Thorstein Veblen, and others as well as by Robinson, was designed to give mature students and teachers complete academic freedom, out of which was to come complete moral accord in rebuilding a wartorn world.
It failed, at least with respect to its original aims, even more rapidly than had its predecessors.
In the free executive board, according to Alvin Johnson, "every man seemed turned against every other one" (Hendricks, post, p. 24).
Two years were enough for Robinson, who resigned as chairman of the executive board in 1921. He still hoped, encouraged by the great popular success of his The Mind in the Making (1921), to help by his writing to bring about that great change in human control of the human environment without which, he was convinced, mankind might well destroy itself in deadly foreign and domestic wars.
He went back to his biology and his microscope for consolation; the squirming little creatures he saw there could not be perverted by higher education.
In all these years Robinson wrote steadily.
Early publications of source materials were followed by a long series of textbooks on European history at both the college and the secondary school level, often in collaboration with James Breasted or Charles Beard. A series of articles, some of them originally published in professional reviews, was collected in 1912 under the title of The New History. This remains today the most significant and important of his general books, though in terms of best selling it was far outdone by The Mind in the Making, which Robinson wrote in the hope of converting the educated many to the need for critical thinking about human behavior.
His most succinct statement of his position is the brief The Humanizing of Knowledge (1923). The posthumous The Human Comedy (1937), assembled and edited with a fair amount of discretion by a faithful disciple, Harry Elmer Barnes, has flashes of the old Robinson but on the whole adds little to his achievement.
Robinson's great originality is his full awareness of all that the behavioral sciences of biology, psychology, and, in some writers like Pareto, sociology, were doing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to show how very hard indeed it is for human beings to think about their own affairs in the way the natural scientist thinks while he is thinking as a scientist
No professional historian approached Robinson in his early understanding of this particular form of what, unfortunately, has to be called "anti-intellectualism. "
William James, Freud, Trotter, Pareto, even John Donne--they all crop up in the prescient early pages of The Mind in the Making.
Perhaps the pessimism of Robinson's last years was due in part to a feeling that right reason is clearly so difficult for men to attain that education has already hopelessly lost the race with ignorance.
Yet the abiding stamp his life has left is nothing so negative as a now fashionable sense of doom, but rather a wry and chastened, yet in an odd way renewed, faith in the liberal tradition of our founding fathers.
He died at his home in New York City of a heart attack. At his own wish his body was cremated, and there was no funeral.
Robinson may be called a secularist, an agnostic, a freethinker, but the best term for this phase of his temperament and ideas comes from the French: anticlerical.
Politics
Robinson was early too good a liberal internationalist to condemn any nation entire; but it seems clear that he did not really like the self-consciously successful Germany of the new Reich and that he came back from Europe much more sympathetic toward the rationalist and empiricist traditions of France.
He had long felt that American colleges and universities were not educating enough men and women and were not educating them the right way, especially in the field of history; and he had been uncomfortable in the midst of the patriotic war-feelings of the majority of the Columbia community during the first World War.
Here in Robinson is the core of traditional Western liberalism: a firm belief that in all men there is a potential capacity for right reasoning, that proper institutions, especially educational institutions, will free that capacity from the corrupting restraints religion, the class structure, and many other environmental evils have laid upon it, and that, thus freed, creative individual intelligence will make the pursuit of happiness the attainment of happiness for all.
Views
The New School, planned by Charles A. Beard, John Dewey, Alvin Johnson, Thorstein Veblen and others as well as by Robinson, was designed to give mature students and teachers complete academic freedom, out of which was to come complete moral accord in rebuilding a wartorn world. It was to have no degrees, no grades, no academic red tape, no trustees. It can, indeed, be regarded as essentially a belated and special form of the American ideal community or consociate family, such as Brook Farm or New Harmony.
He had a connected set of ideas about human behavior and the relation of the study of history to that behavior and to the possibilities of altering it for the better which, whether spread through his lectures, his textbooks, his students, or his books for the general reader, forms his chief contribution to the making of American history. Like many professional historians of his generation, he was suspicious of philosophy and contemptuous of philosophy of history.
Robinson had, in the broad common-sense meaning of the phrase, his own philosophy of history.
First, Robinson rejected all forms of supernaturalism; man is for him wholly a part of nature.
But in human evolution the millennia we somewhat patronizingly call "pre-history" are certainly more important than the few centuries of recorded history.
If with their help he studies the whole record of man, he can learn, not just the Rankean wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it really was) but wie es eigentlich geworden (how it really came about, how it evolved).
He cannot, of course, get from the fragmentary records of the past enough data to make a complete inductive study of human evolution.
We cannot, according to Robinson, acquire this knowledge if we keep on studying history as a political and military record, or as an interesting story, or--worst danger perhaps of all--as the conservative studies it, in search of precedents to retain or go back to.
The historian of the French Revolution must eschew detailing the horrors of the guillotine, the sufferings of Marie Antoinette, and explain just how in these years changes were made in the way ordinary Frenchmen lived, thought, and felt.
Finally, he maintained, history must cease to try to back up the conservative in his futile effort to preserve things as they are, in his mistaken notion that human nature remains the same.
History does not afford precedents, nor even real analogies; and human nature is constantly changing, constantly, perhaps rapidly, evolving.
It is up to the historian and his allies the social scientists to show us how to make those inevitable changes the right ones.
For right changes are not inevitable--far from it.
The historian and his allies, in short, must show ordinary men how to overcome the burden of the past by understanding how that burden arose and grew.
The burden, basically, is one of false thinking--a burden of metaphysics, theology, reverie, rationalizing, unconscious assumptions, unconscious imitation, mental laziness.
Once the burden is cast away and men begin to think right--essentially, to think about their tastes, their morals, their desires, their whole "culture" in the way natural scientists think about the structure of the atom or the role of the endocrine glands--they will at last be able to live well.
But they had better hurry.
They had better come soon, for instance, to the scientific understanding of what is coldly called nationalism and take steps to cope with its excesses.
Modern man cannot stand many more world wars.
"History, as H. G. Wells has so finely expressed it, is coming more and more to be 'a race between education and catastrophe'" (Mind in the Making, p. 228).
Now a great deal of this set of beliefs would have seemed familiar to Jefferson and Thomas Paine, not to say to the Condorcet who wrote the Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit in the shadow of the guillotine. Voltaire quite happily accepted the need, even the prolonged need, for enlightened despotism.
Quotations:
Indeed he wrote--and this is a good average sample of his style--that "some of the more exuberant representatives of the newer social sciences remind the historian disagreeably of the now nearly extinct tribe of philosophers of history, who flattered themselves that their penetrating intellects had been able to discover the wherefore of man's past without the trouble of learning much about it" (New History, p. 9).
Robinson, true to the American tradition, never very explicitly faced the problem of despotism and freedom; but especially in the last part of The Humanizing of Knowledge he does admit the need for "a new class of writers and teachers" who will lead the emancipation, and indeed in a great deal of his work one can discern a leaning toward that "cultural engineering" of the Fabian type which is one of the contemporary forms of belief in in enlightened despotism.
Personality
Robinson was in his active teaching years a strikingly suggestive lecturer, most informal by formal rhetorical standards but by no means without artistry.
He had a great gift for the pungent contemporary allusion, skillfully made and without offensive anachronistic overtones to the historically minded.
He had the Yankee sense of mission, which ultimately was to overcome his Yankee sense of irony.
That mission was early directed in part against organized Christianity.
There is no good evidence that his family environment was unduly Victorian or puritan; indeed he seems to have had, for the time, a most permissive upbringing.
He was a kindly person without being a warm one, a hard worker and conscientious nonconformist, clever, witty, rather in the tradition of French esprit than in that of English or American humor. Robinson in this respect put a kind of self-denying ordinance on himself, for he had the artist's gift for narrative; indeed the artist in him was often strong enough to challenge the preacher.
His last years were clouded by an increasing sense of impending doom for the race; the human mind simply would not be made fast enough.
Quotes from others about the person
At the University of Pennsylvania and in his first years at Columbia Robinson made, through his own publications and through his seminars, real contributions to historical research. But he always seems to have worried lest he contribute to mere antiquarianism, to research for its own sake, and he gradually changed, as one of his first doctoral students, Lynn Thorndike, has put it, from being a "teacher of history" to being a "preacher of history. "
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
If he had a hero in anything like a Carlylean sense, that hero was Voltaire.
Like his hero, he suffered at times from a psychic, indeed cosmic, depression which Barnes rather misleadingly calls his "special 'cross'" (Barnes, post, p. 326).
Connections
Soon after his graduation, on September 1, 1887, Robinson married Grace Woodville Read of Bloomington. They had no children.