Background
Richard Hofstadter was born on August 6, 1916 in Buffalo, New York, United States. He was the son of Emil A. Hofstadter, a Polish-born furrier, and Katherine Hill.
(Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. This book i...)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. This book is a landmark in American political thought. Preeminent Richard Hofstadter examines the passion for progress and reform that colored the entire period from 1890 to 1940 with startling and stimulating results. The Age of Reform searches out the moral and emotional motives of the reformers the myths and dreams in which they believed, and the realities with which they had to compromise.
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(Volume II gathers documents from the period of the Revolu...)
Volume II gathers documents from the period of the Revolution through the Jacksonian era, up to the Civil War and the Emancipation. To fit both Colonial and Early National courses, documents covering 1765-1776 appear at the beginning of this volume and at the end of Volume I.
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(Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. In th...)
Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. In this award-winning classic work of consensus history, Richard Hofstadter, author of The Age of Reform, examines the role of social movements in the perception of intellect in American life. "As Mr. Hofstadter unfolds the fascinating story, it is no crude battle of eggheads and fatheads. It is a rich, complex, shifting picture of the life of the mind in a society dominated by the ideal of practical success." --Robert Peel in the Christian Science Monitor
https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0394703170
( When this classic volume first appeared, academic free...)
When this classic volume first appeared, academic freedom was a crucially important issue. It is equally so today. Hofstadter approaches the topic historically, showing how events from various historical epochs expose the degree of freedom in academic institutions. The volume exemplifies Richard Hofstader's qualities as a historian as well as his characteristic narrative ability. Hofstadter first describes the medieval university and how its political independence evolved from its status as a corporate body, establishing a precedent for intellectual freedom that has been a measuring rod ever since. He shows how all intellectual discourse became polarized with the onset of the Reformation. The gradual spread of the Moderate Enlightenment in the colonies led to a major advance for intellectual freedom. But with the beginning of the nineteenth century the rise of denominationalism in both new and established colleges reversed the progress, and the secularization of learning became engulfed by a tidal wave of intensifying piety. Roger L. Geiger's extensive new introduction evaluates Hofstadter's career as a historian and political theorist, his interest in academic freedom, and the continuing significance of Academic Freedom in the Age of the College. While most works about higher education treat the subject only as an agent of social economic mobility, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College is an enduring counterweight to such histories as it examines a more pressing issue: the fact that colleges and universities, at their best, should foster ideas at the frontiers of knowledge and understanding. This classic text will be invaluable to educators, university administrators, sociologist, and historians.
https://www.amazon.com/Academic-Freedom-College-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/1258450690?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1258450690
(The third volume in Great Issues In American History, Fro...)
The third volume in Great Issues In American History, From Reconstruction to the Present Day is now updated and revised to include another decade of American history. Beatrice K. Hofstadter, wife of the late Richard Hofstadter and herself an historian who worked with him closely on the original edition, has added a new section covering 1970 to 1981 and rearranged other sections in the light of what has since proved to be of lasting importance. This collection of significant documents in American history now goes from Lincoln's Proclamation on the Wade-Davis Bill on July 8, 1864, to Reagan's Address on Arms Control Negotiations on November 18, 1981. Volume I From Settlement to Revolution. 1584-1776 Edited by Clarence L. Ver Steeg and Richard Hofstadter Volume Il From the Revolution to the Civil War. 1765-1865 Edited by Richard Hofstadter
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(Readings explore the events and effects of domestic viole...)
Readings explore the events and effects of domestic violence throughout American history, based primarily on political, economic, and ethnic causes
https://www.amazon.com/American-Violence-Documentary-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394414861?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0394414861
(The American Political Tradition is one of the most influ...)
The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics," Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Political-Tradition-Men-Made/dp/0679723153?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0679723153
(Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall...)
Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought and political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence as justification for the evils as well as the benefits of laissez-faire modern industrial society. Others such as William James and John Dewey argued that human planning was needed to direct social development and improve upon the natural order. Hofstadter's classic study of the ramifications of Darwinism is a major analysis of the social philosophies that animated intellectual movements of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
https://www.amazon.com/Darwinism-American-Thought-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0807055034?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0807055034
(This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work ...)
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.
https://www.amazon.com/Paranoid-Style-American-Politics/dp/0307388441?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0307388441
(Demonstrates how the colonies developed into the first na...)
Demonstrates how the colonies developed into the first nation created under the influences of nationalism, modern capitalism and Protestantism.
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Richard Hofstadter was born on August 6, 1916 in Buffalo, New York, United States. He was the son of Emil A. Hofstadter, a Polish-born furrier, and Katherine Hill.
Hofstadter was educated at local schools and in 1937 graduated from the University of Buffalo with a Bachelor of Arts degree. After studying law briefly, Hofstadter undertook graduate studies in history at Columbia University, which awarded him an Master of Arts. in 1938 and a Ph. D. in 1942. While a graduate student, he taught at Brooklyn College and the College of the City of New York.
In 1942 Hofstadter joined the faculty of the University of Maryland and four years later returned to Columbia as an assistant professor. His first wife died in 1945, and on Jan. 13, 1947, he married Beatrice Kevitt; they had one child. In conjunction with such honorary positions as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 1958-1959 and Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University in 1962-1963, Hofstadter maintained his connection with Columbia until his death in New York City.
He was promoted to associate professor in 1950 and professor in 1952, then designated DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History in 1959. He was scheduled to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians for 1971-1972. With few exceptions, Hofstadter's scholarship concentrated on what he variously termed "milieu, " "mood, " and "mind, " especially as these applied to American political life.
Social Darwinism established Hofstadter's professional credentials as an intellectual historian. The American Political Tradition, with paperback sales of over one million, introduced him to a far wider public. In his second book--a series of scintillating essays that are often bemused, sometimes caustic, but never angry--Hofstadter brought a new cosmopolitan skepticism to bear on the greats and near-greats of a standard schoolbook history. What emerged in these essays was an appreciation for the strength of an accommodating American politics and a deflation of its leaders' reputations.
Between 1948 and 1955, Hofstadter's continuing experiments with different points of view led to a second major departure in his writing and to a period of extraordinary productivity in the early 1950s: two book-length histories of the academic world, the most provocative of the essays in The Paranoid Style, much of what would become Anti-intellectualism, and The Age of Reform. Hofstadter was now drawing from a broad range of ideas in many disciplines and benefiting in particular from his colleagues Lionel Trilling and Robert K. Merton at Columbia, from The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by T. W. Adorno and associates, and from the writings of Karl Mannheim. By assigning great importance to the independent investigator, Mannheim's work in particular encouraged Hofstadter to adopt the role of clinical observer and commentator. Hofstadter moved easily between the past and the present and between impersonal and personal prose styles. At the same time, he sharpened his commitment to judge, to set ethical standards at the heart of his analysis. The combination of detachment in technique and engagement in values became Hofstadter's hallmark. The subjects that he addressed were affected above all by the loose amalgam of anti-Communism, antiliberalism, and traditionalism called McCarthyism, which reached its peak of intensity early in the 1950s and shaped Hofstadter's picture of America more fundamentally than anything preceding it, including the Great Depression and World War II. With the repressive effects of McCarthyism in the air, Hofstadter searched out the sources of enmity to independent thought in America. Its twin nemeses, he decided, were sectarianism and provincialism, historically identified with the new democracy of the nineteenth century and geographically concentrated in the Midwest and the South.
The triumph of small, scattered denominational colleges, which wreaked havoc on whatever supports for intellectual independence had accumulated by Jefferson's time, dominated Hofstadter's view of higher education after 1800, especially in Academic Freedom, where he described a general climate of hostility toward open inquiry. Anti-intellectualism contained his fullest account of America's cultural blight in the nineteenth century. Broadening his scope to include politics, business, and religion, he issued a devastating indictment of intellectual leveling, arid popularization, and narrow-minded smugness.
Although Hofstadter saw new hope for independent thought late in the nineteenth century, major obstacles to a cosmopolitan tolerance remained, and these he examined brilliantly in The Age of Reform. The first, he argued, was Populism, the culmination of nineteenth-century provincialism that romanticized agrarian virtues and responded to adversity by imagining vast conspiracies against ordinary farmers and townspeople. The second obstacle was Progressivism, urban but not urbane, still the product of a moralistic and individualistic "Yankee-Protestant" political culture, which struck a lower emotional pitch than Populism but expressed a similar impulse to crusade against such unfamiliar modern institutions as national business corporations and urban political machines. In a brief conclusion to the book, Hofstadter located a critical change in political culture with the New Deal, which brought issues down to earth and reckoned with them as practical matters. Hofstadter did not claim the disappearance of a rigid, conspiratorial approach to public policy. In fact, his concern about its revival during McCarthy's time and again during the presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 spurred the most imaginative essays in The Paranoid Style, particularly the title essay and "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt. " Nevertheless, Hofstadter became increasingly convinced that the norms of modern politics, especially the reliance on bargain and compromise, put the paranoid style on the defensive.
In general, Hofstadter gave history a progressive thrust, even though he acknowledged its many dips and twists. Within this essentially optimistic framework of America's development, Hofstadter often changed his mind. Before publishing Anti-intellectualism, he appended introductory and concluding chapters that expressed his growing confidence in the state of American society and softened the book's impression of a sweeping condemnation. At the end of the 1960s, in a particularly striking switch, Hofstadter reversed his assessments of America's revolutionary leaders and their Jacksonian counterparts. As recently as Anti-intellectualism, he had praised the former for their rigorous intelligence and deplored the latter's thin, shrill style. In The Idea of a Party System he shifted ground, now stressing the inability of the revolutionary leaders to accept a regular political opposition and praising the founders of an institutionalized two-party competition early in the nineteenth century for their service to America's stability. All of his judgments, however, were dominated by the same standards: the importance of reasonableness, moderation, and compromise. For Hofstadter, the highest purpose of these virtues was their support for the free play of the mind. Wherever he sensed a broad respect for ideas, as he did in contemporary England and in the United States during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, he was particularly warm in his praise. He celebrated the metropolis as the environment that best nourished free inquiry.
Nevertheless, the tension between mass democracy and creative thinking normally put intellectuals on the defensive, he concluded, and they needed a secure harbor. That function Hofstadter assigned to the modern university. His attachment to the modern university found its most eloquent expression in 1968, when he became the first faculty member in the history of Columbia University to deliver its commencement address. In the wake of harsh, sometimes violent conflicts between students and authorities at Columbia and other universities, Hofstadter gave voice to the temperate, tolerant quality of "comity, " an ideal that he identified with the university. Inside the centers of free inquiry, moderation was no longer a virtue. There Hofstadter did not merely welcome a spirit of daring; he exemplified it.
Although other important historians, including David M. Potter and Oscar Handlin, joined him around midcentury in expanding the range of interdisciplinary history, Hofstadter led the field both in the boldness of his concepts and in the breadth of his audience. With the publication of The Age of Reform, a work that incorporated the concepts of myth from anthropology, status from sociology, and modal personality from psychology, and that adapted textual analysis from literary criticism, he stood preeminent among the interdisciplinary pioneers. Why Hofstadter exercised such a powerful influence was not so obvious. Graceful writing helped. To a fluid, accessible prose, he added a genius for phrasing: America's "psychic crisis" in the 1890s, a "paranoid style, " the "soft side" and the "hard side" of the agrarian mind, a "status revolution" behind progressive reform. These and the ones he borrowed, such as "agrarian myth" and "anti-intellectualism, " he used not to catch the eye as much as to open the mind. Through his phrases he became the gracious yet insistent didact who instructed a wide audience on new ways of understanding. While Hofstadter led, he also responded. He first championed ideas during an unusual vogue for intellectuals around midcentury. When first Joseph McCarthy and then Barry Goldwater preoccupied his contemporaries, Hofstadter wrote about them.
When the subject of violence swept public discussion in the late 1960s, he turned his attention there. Along with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Hofstadter improved the art of applying history to public commentary. Just as he let current affairs spur his historical inquiries, so he went to the past to illuminate the present. This sensitive interplay between past and present heightened the general interest in Hofstadter's writings. Hofstadter made his interpretive innovations more acceptable by leaving matters of historical causation flexible. Despite his differences with Charles Beard's history, he rarely failed to give economic motivations their due. In certain studies, notably The Age of Reform, he relied heavily on sociological sources (status, occupation, ethnicity) to explain a prevailing mood. In The Paranoid Style, on the other hand, he employed a personality type that stood free from an economic or a social context. Hofstadter softened the shock of new ideas by cushioning them with familiar ones.
Some of his most striking contributions came disguised as mere adaptations of intellectual history to the study of a popular mind. He treated social movements that arose from fear or anxiety as less substantial than those rooted in motives his readers more readily recognized, such as political ambition and economic interest. In Hofstadter's account, bargain-minded spokesmen for the New Deal had a firmer grip on reality than the status-minded spokesmen for Progressivism. These distinctions also bespoke Hofstadter's beliefs. Under no circumstances, for example, could he accept judgments from the political right and left that the United States government was the "main enemy. " Hofstadter's steadfast moderation broadened the audience for his intellectual daring. Rejecting a fashionable skepticism about ultimate values, Hofstadter held firmly to intellectual freedom as an absolute good. He treated science, which exemplified that freedom in action, as a neutral truth and as a standard for measuring civilization's progress. When critics identified Hofstadter with the consensus school of interpretation, which elevated reasonableness, pragmatism, and accommodation into the American way, they confused his personal convictions with his scholarly conclusions.
After 1948, Hofstadter found relatively little in the American tradition that sustained the values of consensus. The more committed he became to moderation's indispensability, the more sensitive he grew to its violations. He never mistook his own creed for the record of America's past. Hofstadter's looseness about historical causation and his passion for free inquiry contributed to a remarkable openness in intellectual exchanges. Whatever his companion's point of view, Hofstadter asked only that it have substance. Where he found it, his companion became his equal in a common quest, a trait that superior graduate students recalled with great satisfaction. Mediocrity bored Hofstadter, a characteristic that other students recalled less fondly, and his impatience with the limitations of ordinary minds also affected his work. He never achieved a sympathetic understanding of the angry frustration and flawed reasoning of those countless Americans past and present who were stymied or confused by their world.
Demagogues in a democracy disturbed him deeply. Why others were less open and adventurous than he became a puzzle which Hofstadter devoted much of his scholarly career to resolving.
(Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall...)
(This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work ...)
(The third volume in Great Issues In American History, Fro...)
(Readings explore the events and effects of domestic viole...)
(Demonstrates how the colonies developed into the first na...)
(Volume II gathers documents from the period of the Revolu...)
(The American Political Tradition is one of the most influ...)
( When this classic volume first appeared, academic free...)
(Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. In th...)
(Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. This book i...)
Hofstadter, influenced by his wife, was a member of the Young Communist League in college, and in April 1938 he joined the Communist Party of the USA; he quit in 1939.
Biographer Susan Baker writes that Hofstadter, "was profoundly influenced by the political Left of the 1930s. . .. The philosophical impact of Marxism was so intense and direct during Hofstadter's formative years that it formed a major part of his identity crisis. . .. The impact of these years created his orientation to the American past, accompanied as it was by marriage, establishment of life-style, and choice of profession. "
In the 1940s, Hofstadter cited Charles A. Beard as "the exciting influence on me. "
Hofstadter specifically responded to Beard's social-conflict model of U. S. history, which emphasized the struggle among competing economic groups and discounted abstract political rhetoric which rarely translated into action. Beard encouraged historians to search for the hidden self-interest and financial goals of the economic belligerents.
By the 1950s and 1960s Hofstadter had a strong reputation in liberal circles.
On October 3, 1936, Hofstadter married Felice Swados; they had one child. Later he married Beatrice Fineberg Kevitt; the couple also had a child.