Robert Livingston Schuyler

Background

Robert Livingston was born on February 26, 1883 in New York City, New York, United States, the son of Montgomery Schuyler, a journalist and architectural writer, and Katherine Beeckman Livingston, a gifted amateur artist and singer.

Education

Schuyler studied the violin, which he is reported as playing in the orchestra at a Columbia varsity show, but he decided against a musical career. Schuyler began his undergraduate studies in 1899, only three years after the formal establishment of a department of history within the School (later Faculty) of Political Science at Columbia. Among his teachers were some of the principal founders and shapers of the historical profession in the United States - John W. Burgess, William A. Dunning, Herbert L. Osgood, and James harvey Robinson. From them, Schuyler derived his lifelong interest in constitutional history and an impressive capacity for exploiting documentary materials. He graduated from Columbia College in 1903. In 1904 Schuyler received the Master of arts from Columbia. Schuyler took his Doctor of philosophy from Columbia in 1909.

Career

In 1904 Schuyler worked as a reporter for the New York Times. Two years later, he became an instructor in history at Yale University, where a senior colleague was George Burton Adams, whose celebrated textbook on English constitutional history Schuyler revised in 1934.

In 1910 Schuyler returned to Columbia College as lecturer; he was promoted to assistant professor in 1911, to associate professor in 1919, and to professor in 1924, with the title of Gouverneur Morris Professor from 1942. Schuyler drew up the syllabus for the Columbia College course in American history (1913) and, with Carlton J. H. Hayes, the syllabus in modern European history (1912), the latter notable for its attention to economic and cultural history.

Schuyler's service as a first lieutenant in the Twenty-second Engineers, New York National Guard, in 1918-1921 and perhaps his own academic and scholarly bent kept him apart from the postwar innovations in general education through which Columbia had so profound an effect on American undergraduate curricula. He concentrated instead on training graduate students.

Like his teaching, Schuyler's published work was rooted in both sides of the Atlantic. His dissertation, The Transition in Illinois from British to American Government (1909), was followed in 1923 by The Constitution of the United States, which grew out of lectures on the formation of the Constitution given two years earlier at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. His Parliament and the British Empire (1929) was the next work.

In 1931 his work Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writing appeared. Schuyler's last major book was The Fall of the Old Colonial System (1945). It was natural that one so expert at small-scale distillation of extensive research should also have had a distinguished career as an editor - of Political Science Quarterly (1919 - 1921), Columbia Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law (1923-1929; 1944 - 1948), and American Historical Review (1936 - 1941).

After his retirement from Columbia in 1951 and brief stints of teaching at the University of Denver and Hobart College, he became editor of the second supplement (1958) of the Dictionary of American Biography.

In his later years at Columbia, he was in charge of the historiography course required of graduate students, and anyone who heard his opening lectures was permanently inoculated against the dangers of presentmindedness. Schuyler's exacting standards and scrupulous craftsmanship were reflected in lectures untouched by drama, sweeping speculation, or modish controversy.

In 1945, Schuyler remarked on the passing of an era symbolized by the retirement of Nicholas Murray Butler after nearly half a century as president of Columbia.

Schuyler died in Rochester, New York.

Achievements

• Robert Livingston Schuyler spent nearly half a century, most of his academic career, at Columbia University, initially as a lecturer, later a president. He was extremely popular scholar of early American history and British history in both sides of the Atlantic. His famous books: The Transition in Illinois from British to American government (1909), The Constitution of the United States (1923), Josiah Tucker: A Selection from his Economic and Political Writings (1931) and others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A syllabus of modern history : intended for the use of students in History A in Columbia University

    (This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)

  • The Transition in Illinois from British to American Government

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Views

Schuyler was one of a remarkable group of American historians who, rejecting the nationalistic bias endemic to much American history-writing, attempted to explain how the old British Empire had really worked. He was also fascinated by the relaxation of the imperial grip in the nineteenth century, anticipated in the eighteenth century in the arguments of Josiah Tucker, the dean of Gloucester.

Quotations: "One who was born in the Horse and Buggy Age, " he wrote to Butler, "may live a few years into the Atomic Age, but he can never really belong to it".

Personality

"Funny, " wrote one former student, "he was dull and good. "

Interests

• Schuyler had an abiding interest in his great English predecessors Macaulay, J. R. Green, and, above all, F. W. Maitland.

Connections

Schuyler married Sara Keller Brooks on October 19, 1907. The wedding reception was held at the Hotel Gramatan in Bronxville, New York and invitations were sent to President Theodore Roosevelt and Mrs. Edith Roosevelt, former president Grover Cleveland and his wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland, Secretary and Mrs. Elihu Root, Senator and Mrs. Chauncey Depew, and many others.

Father:

Montgomery Schuyler

Mother:

Katherine Beeckman Livingston

Spouse:

Sara Keller Brooks

Brother:

Montgomery Schuyler Jr.

teacher:

Herbert L. Osgood

teacher:

John W. Burgess

teacher:

William A. Dunning

teacher:

James Harvey Robinson

References

• Some Modern Historians of Britain: Essays in Honor of R. L. Schuyler by Some of His Former Students At Columbia University - 1st Edition/1st Printing