Word: bearding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...times, he seemed more like a Hoosier schoolmaster than an eminent historian. He was long and lean, baggily dressed, and always in need of a haircut-"a poor professor," he liked to say, "on his way from obscurity to oblivion." But when Charles Austin Beard threw back his head, squinted down his long nose, and began to lecture at Columbia University, students jammed in to hear him. And when he perched on the edge of a desk to speak of his own research ("Now I'll tell you what I found out last night"), historians from all over...
...radical. He was forever popping up-at congressional hearings, protest meetings, or with a new book-to attack Hearst, or Wall Street, the "intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism," or the internationalists and their "giddy minds." No one ever quite knew what he would say next. "Have you read Charles Beard's last book?" someone once asked Nicholas Murray Butler. Huffed Columbia's president: "I hope...
...Beard insisted that American history was not only a record of great men, of wars and politics-but also of the way ordinary men & women had lived in their land, and of the social and economic forces that had led and pushed them. In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) he probed into the personal motives of the Founding Fathers themselves, suggested that as men of property they had been privately interested in a charter that would protect their own wealth. To older historians, such an approach was blasphemous. Harvard's grizzled Albert Bushnell Hart declared the book...
...learned much from Uncle Charlie's rufflings, and from his characteristic "Now, let us examine the assumptions." And when (in his opinion) too many of his followers began to write as if all U.S. history had been "determined" by economic forces alone, he ruffled them once more. Said Beard: "The economic interpretation is one key to history . . . not the key." He cautioned that all history-writing had an unavoidable bias, that each historian would approve or disapprove, stress or ignore, according to his time and temperament...
...Generation to School. Beard's influence spread beyond his colleagues, the historians. During the '20s, with his wife Mary, he wrote a brilliant and provocative survey history of the U.S., The Rise of American Civilization. The book became a standard work in U.S. schools and colleges. A whole generation of Americans learned their U.S. history in Uncle Charlie's school...