Merle Curti

Merle Curti (1897-1997) was a leading American historian. He taught a large number of PhD students at the University of Wisconsin, and was a leader in social social and intellectual history. He was a pioneer in peace studies, intellectual history and social history—and helped develop Quantitative History as a tool in historical research.

Life

Curti was born near Omaha, Nebraska in 1897. He was the son of a physician who had immigrated from Switzerland; his mother was a Yankee from Vermont. He obtained a bachelor's degree in 1920 and his Ph.D. in 1927—both from Harvard University, where he was one of the last students of Frederick Jackson Turner.

Curti taught at Beloit College, Smith College, Teachers College, Columbia University, and (from 1942 to 1968), at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also taught in Japan, Australia, and India.

Academic career

While at Smith College, Curti published his first book, The American Peace Crusade, 1815-1860. The book, based on his dissertation, was written after Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (who had replaced Turner at Harvard) rejected his first dissertation proposal which was an excessively ambitious early version of The Growth of American Thought.

Moving to Teachers College in 1931, he published a book on William Jennings Bryan and world peace (Bryan and World Peace). It was followed by Peace or War: The American Struggle in 1936. With these works, Curti helped found peace studies as a field of study. The Roots of American Loyalty (1946) was a history of patriotism. Curti was called to the Frederick Jackson Turner professorship at the University of Wisconsin, one of the nation's three or four most influential centers of historical scholarship, where he remained until his retirement in 1968. He continued to write after retirement, keeping up-to-date an influential textbook, Rise of the American Nation for the schools coauthored with Lewis Todd.

Intellectual history

Curti turned his attention to intellectual history, and helped to establish that field as a distinct academic discipline. His first foray in the field was The Social Ideals of American Educators, published in 1935. In 1944, Curti won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his masterwork, The Growth of American Thought. Its chapters show an encyclopedia knowledge of thinkers great and small from the colonial period to the present, together with his commitment to democracy as a process springing from the ideas of the people. Curti adapted Turner's frontier thesis to intellectual history, arguing, "Because the American environment, physical and social, differed from that of Europe, Americans, confronted by different needs and problems, adapted the European intellectual heritage in their own way. And because American life came increasingly to differ from European life, American ideas, American agencies of intellectual life, and the use made of knowledge likewise came to differ in America from their European counterparts." (p vi) His book was not so much a history of American thought as a social history of American thought, with strong attention to the social and economic forces that shaped that thought. Contents:

1. . A Variety of Peoples Bequeath Legacies to the New Nation
2. . Colonial Conditions Modify the Old World Heritage
3. . The Christian Heritage
4. . The Transmission of Polite Learning and of Scientific Interests
5. . The Rise of the Enlightenment
6. . The Revolutionary Shift in Emphasis
7. . The Expanding Enlightenment
8. . The Conservative Reaction
9. . Patrician Direction of Thought
10. . Nationalism Challenges Cosmopolitanism and Regionalism
11. . The West Challenges Patrician Leadership
12. . New Currents of Equalitarian Thought and Practice
13. . The Advance of Science and Technology
14. . The Popularization of Knowledge
15. . New Goals for Democracy
16. . The Rising Tide of Patriotism and Nationalism
17. . Cultural Regionalism in the Old South
18. . The Thrust of the Civil War into Intellectual Life
19. . The Nature of the New Nationalism
20. . Business and the Life of the Mind
21. . The Delimitation of Supernaturalism
22. . Evolutionary Thought in a Utilitarian Society
23. . Professionalization and Popularization of Learning
24. . Formulas of Protest and Reform
25. . The Conservative Defense
26. . America Recrosses the Oceans
27. . Prosperity, Disillusionment, Criticism
28. . Crisis and New Searches
29. . American Assertions in a World of Upheaval

New Social History

In 1959, Curti published a collaborative social history of rural Trempealeau County, Wisconsin using quantitative analysis of census records. The book which came out of the project, "The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County," and immediately became an important pioneer work in the "new social history." The "old" social history comprised descriptions of everyday lifestyles, perhaps with a coverage of grass roots political movements (like the Populists), His "new" social history was a systematic examination of the entire population using statistics and social science methodologies.

Over the years, Curti supervised over 80 doctoral dissertations, allowing his students a free hand in content and methodology.

Memberships, awards and honors

He was president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now the Organization of American Historians) in 1952 and the American Historical Association in 1954.

He was a co-founder of the American Studies Association. He served as the organization's vice-president in 1954 and 1955, and was asked to serve as president in 1956. But he declined the honor because he was going to be out of the country.

Curti was an elected member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

In 1977, the Organization of American Historians established the Merle Curti Award. The prize is given annually for the best book in social, intellectual, and/or cultural history.

Publications

• Bryan and World Peace. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Studies in History, 1931.
• The Social ideas of American Educators with New Chapter on the last twenty-five years (1932, 1959)
• Peace or War: The American Struggle. (1936). excerpt and text search
• The Growth of American Thought. (1943, 1951), 912pp. online edition
• The University of Wisconsin A History 1848-1925 (2 vol 1949) with Vernon Carstenson
• The Roots of American Loyalty (1946) online edition
• The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County. 1959.
• American Philanthropy Abroad (1988)
• America's History textbook coauthored with Lewis Paul Todd; many editions

References

• Conkin, Paul K. "Merle Curti." In Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000. ed. by Robert Allen Rutland, (2000). ISBN 0826213162 [ online edition]
• Davis, Allen F. "Memorial to Merle E. Curti." American Studies Association Newsletter. June 1996.
• Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. (1988). ISBN 0521357454

External links

• Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians

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