Word: thernstrom
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...difference is clear in this year's topics. The Harvard alumni college offered a session called "Four American Centuries," with Professors Donald H. Fleming, Bernard Ballyn, Frank B. Freidel, Oscar Handlin. Stephan A. Thernstrom, and Stephen W. Botein '63--Dele Simmonds '52, a Radcliffe alumna who attended the session, says the saw three of their names mentioned in the New York Times during the week before she came. The second session was "devoted to a provocative look at controversial issues in the area of science and medicine," the brochure says, with Professors Everett I. Mendelsohn, Barbara G. Rosenkrantz, and lectures...
...score-keepers of society have become though, there is no reason we should suppose, as Barzun does, that proliferation of information necessarily leads to the sterilization of history. Barzun seeks the victory of historical artist over historical statistician, without considering the possibility that someone might be both. Yet Stephen Thernstrom's heavily statistical studies are as sensitive to the unquantifiable as any previous works on social mobility. Richard Sennett's book on nineteenth-century family life in Chicago (Families Against the City) is as audacious and speculative, though not as wide-ranging, as anything Barzun has written--but, unlike Barzun...
...Barzun's objections seriously, except perhaps as a warning that they should be careful no matter what sort of data they employ. Luckily, not all older historians are so full of methodological reaction. Oscar Handlin, not the most liberal man at Harvard, is the mentor of both Sennett and Thernstrom, and he managed to pass on to the younger historians the critical historical sense that served him so well in less quantitative works. The two cultures of humanism and science have probably come closer to merging in history than in any other field...
Quite a few History and Literature majors were nonplussed last year by the selection of Stephen. Thernstrom as the speaker at the annual History and Lit dinner. His brand of history was not theirs. Yet the distinction they saw was not one of historical philosophy or bias or method of analysis, but merely that Thernstrom employed certain facts from history that, being numbers, required some basic mathematical treatment before being placed in a larger frame of analysis. The real differences among historians--those we should tune our minds to discover--do not concern whether data is mathematical...
...this fall, 200 residents volunteered the first day. In an hour, notices of marches or meetings can be printed and hand-distributed to every house and apartment in Southie. "When we get our mind on something, the whole community pitches in," explained one resident. Says Harvard Historian Stephan Thernstrom: "The solidarity in South Boston is one of a people trapped there." The bitterest irony in Southie's implacable determination to keep blacks out of South Boston High is that many residents frankly concede that the 71-year-old school is one of the city's worst...