Marcus Lee Hansen was an American historian and educator. He served as a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and as member of the Board of Editors of the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
Background
Marcus Lee Hansen was born on December 8, 1892 in Neenah, Wisconsin, United States. He was the fourth son and sixth of the seven children of Reverend Marcus Hansen (Danish-born) and Gina Lee (Norwegian-born), both of whom came to the United States in 1871. Hansen moved from place to place in that state and in Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois as his intensely religious Baptist father (a convert) established new churches among Danes and Norwegians who were becoming Americans.
Education
After attending Central College in Pella, Iowa, for two years, Hansen obtained his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the State University of Iowa in 1916 and 1917. He then went on for graduate study at Harvard University, where, working under Frederick Jackson Turner, he began his investigations of the migrations of peoples across the Atlantic, receiving his Ph. D. in 1924.
Career
Hansen began persistent research in Europe in 1922, served for two years as assistant professor at Smith College, and was a fellow of the Social Science Research Council in Europe, 1925-1927, working in unused archives and newspaper files at many centers and systematically cultivating his linguistic aptitudes. As research associate in Washington of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1927-1928, he compiled data relative to the national origins of the white American stock in 1790 for the new restrictive immigration quotas.
His teaching career culminated at the University of Illinois, where he became associate professor in 1928 and professor in 1930. He was historian for the A. C. L. S. committee on a linguistic atlas of the United States and Canada, delivered the Commonwealth Fund Lectures at the University of London in 1935, and in that year generously interrupted his work on the history of migration across the Atlantic when his imagination was stirred by a proposal to write the history of Canadian-American migration.
His untimely death was the result of chronic nephritis. He died while on sabbatical leave in Redlands, Calif. , and was buried at Newell, Iowa.
After his death Arthur M. Schlesinger edited and brought out Hansen's The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860 (1940) and his collected lectures and papers, The Immigrant in American History (1940), while J. B. Brebner edited and completed The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (1940). A modest and humorous scholar, Hansen was a witty and stimulating companion, as his students and other scholarly associates attested.
After his death it became apparent that he also had unusual gifts as a writer, for his deceptively simple, lucid style concealed great art in exposition, as well as unique knowledge and the capacities both to generalize it and to particularize it by vivid, intimate, and individual instances drawn from his own youthful experiences and from the most varied source materials. He was generous and appreciative towards the work of other scholars. Almost at once attentive historians began to use the fresh concepts that he had substantiated and to accept his modifications of shallower views in such matters as: the restraints on emigration imposed by the masters of local communities in Europe; his definition of the periodic pulses of migration; the establishment of an Atlantic base in North America by the end of the eighteenth century; the inability of the new European immigrant to use "that deadly tool, the American ax"; the immigrant often learning the ways of American agriculture as a hired hand before he became a settler; "hives, " in settled North American areas, "ready to swarm"; four geographically and technologically oriented "columns" of migrants in North America; cities as "distribution points" for migration; and so on.
Having stopped at 1860 (except for his publications relating to Canada) and having stressed European propulsion somewhat more than American attraction, he had barely touched upon the adaptability of the migrant from European steppes to pioneering on the North American high plains. His confident assertion, "No attempt to found a colony of foreigners on the edge of the wilderness ever succeeded, " could be appreciably countered by reference to the first-comers on the Atlantic coast, to the Selkirk settlers in Manitoba, and to others elsewhere, particularly after 1850. Having spent over twenty years in his investigations before publishing more than three or four articles, he achieved posthumous fame.
Fifteen years or so after his death, economic historians began to provide statistical measurements of the stimuli and responses on both sides of the Atlantic that he first made evident. The principal amendments of Hansen's work have come from closer attention to the ebbs and reverse migrations from the column-heads, and to towns and cities as both destinations and refuges from adversity to a greater degree than a rural Middle Westerner had conceived.
Membership
Hansen was a member of the Board of Editors of the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
Personality
Hansen's shrewd commentaries on the usually conservative social and political behavior of the migrants have been qualified in part by closer students of the cities. The migrations to eastern Europe, Africa, Central and South America, and Australasia to which he gave mere mention were open to obvious amplification. Yet Hansen has had no close rival as student and interpreter of the unparalleled movements of peoples across the Atlantic and within the North American continent. He constructed novel patterns of the persistent forces that stimulated these movements.
Quotes from others about the person
"No other scholar has contributed more to the emergence of immigration studies as a special historical field than Marcus Lee Hansen. " - immigration authority and author Frederick Hale