Editing Henry Steele Commager (section)

==Career==
Commager originally studied [[Danish history]], and wrote his PhD dissertation on the Danish [[philosopher]] [[Johann Friedrich Struensee]], a major reformer during the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]]. Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian [[Andrew C. McLaughlin]], Commager shifted his research and teaching interests to [[American history]].  Another of his mentors was the colonial American historian [[Marcus W. Jernegan]], for whom he later co-edited a [[festschrift]] (with [[William T. Hutchison]]), ''The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937).

Commager taught at [[New York University]] from 1926 to 1939, at [[Columbia University]] from 1939 to 1956, and at [[Amherst College]] in [[Massachusetts]] from 1956 to 1992.<ref name="Bernstein 1999"/>{{sfn|Jumonville|1999|p=120}}  He retired in 1992 from the John Woodruff Simpson Lectureship, and died, aged 95, in [[Amherst, Massachusetts|Amherst]], Massachusetts.  Commager emphasized to his generations of students that historians must write not only for one another but for a wider audience.

Commager's first solo book was his 1936 biography ''Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader'', a life of the [[Unitarianism|Unitarian]] minister, [[transcendentalist]], reformer, and abolitionist [[Theodore Parker]]; it was reissued in 1960, along with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best known of Parker's many writings.  Two characteristic books were his 1950 [[intellectual history]] ''The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Character Thought Since the 1880s'' and his 1977 study ''The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment''.

Commager was principally an intellectual and [[cultural history|cultural historian]]; he was influenced by the literary historian [[Vernon L. Parrington]], but also worked in the fields of constitutional and political history.  His work on this subject includes his 1943 series of controversial lectures, ''Majority Rule and Minority Rights'', which argued for a curtailed scope for [[judicial review]], pointing out on the history of the [[US Supreme Court]]'s uses of judicial review to strike down economic regulatory legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century.  Later, Commager espoused the use of judicial review by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice [[Earl Warren]] to protect racial and religious minorities from discrimination and to safeguard individual liberties as protected by the [[United States Bill of Rights|Bill of Rights]] and the [[Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution|Fourteenth Amendment]].