Word: handlinism
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...Handlin defends the department's decision to reject these promotion bids. "Other universities have 30 to 40 historians permanently. They can take any old bum they want to, and they often do," he said earlier in the year. "We have a small group so we have to be a lot more cautious. Since there's a dearth of talent we have to go slowly...
Professors attribute the wing's internal struggles to a split between the Old Guard--such as Adams University Professor Bernard Bailyn, Trumbull Professor Donald Fleming, and Loeb University Professor Emeritus Oscar Handlin--and more recently tenured Americanists such as Winthrop Professor of History Stephan A. Thernstrom, Warren Professor of American History David H. Donald, and Du Bois. Professor of History and Afro-American Studies Nathan I. Huggins...
...sense believe that Professors Bailyn, Fleming and Handlin are infallible. I have known them much too long to believe such a thing. Nevertheless, their reservations about loading a department with specialists in flowers that bloom in the spring and fade in the summer seem to me to do them credit. The back offices of history departments which did not resist pressure to be up-to-date are now full of such worthless rubbish, which by law they must keep until death do them part. J.H. Hexter Professor of History Director Center for the History of Freedom Washington Univeristy...
...HANDLIN FOLLOWS a time-honored Harvard path--illuminate the broadest themes of American history by covering everything. At its best, this tradition has produced Adams University Professor Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic. Those books covered an immense era with breathtaking skill. Few books on American history offer such a bravado assault on the origins of American society and do so with such consummate insight and originality...
Liberty and Power seems to be torn by two impulses. On the one hand, Oscar Handlin, who retired last year, may have felt compelled to write it as the definitive version of his view of the main themes in American history. But on the other hand, as the rather overblown subtitle suggests, this book may have been meant for the bookshelves of Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. As the latter, it may succeed. But as the former, it would never have won Handlin tenure...