Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Henry Steele Commager
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Liberalism=== Commager felt a duty as a professional historian to reach out to his fellow citizens. He believed that an educated public that understands American history would support liberal programs, especially internationalism and the [[New Deal]] of [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]. Although he was skilled at scholarly research and analysis, he preferred to devise and expound sweeping interpretations of historical events and processes, while also making available primary sources so that people could study history for themselves. Commager was representative of a generation of like-minded historians widely read by the general public, including [[Samuel Eliot Morison]], [[Allan Nevins]], [[Richard Hofstadter]], [[Arthur Schlesinger Jr.]], and [[C. Vann Woodward]].{{sfn|Jumonville|1999}} Commager's biographer Neil Jumonville has argued that this style of influential public history has been lost in the 21st century, because political correctness has rejected Commager's open marketplace of tough ideas. Jumonville says history now features abstruse deconstruction by experts, with statistics instead of stories, and is comprehensible now only to the initiated, with ethnocentrism ruling in place of common identity.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Lindstrom |first=Andy |date=Fall 1999 |title=Henry Steele Commager (1902β1998): An American Mind in the American Century |url=http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/fallwinter99/features/commager.html |magazine=Research in Review |location=Tallahassee, Florida |publisher=Florida State University |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101223073033/http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/fallwinter99/features/commager.html |archive-date=December 23, 2010 |access-date=August 23, 2020}}</ref> Commager was a liberal interpreter of the [[United States Constitution|Constitution]] and [[United States Bill of Rights|Bill of Rights]], which he understood as creating a powerful general government that at the same time recognized a wide spectrum of individual rights and liberties. Commager opposed [[McCarthyism]] in the 1940s and 1950s, the [[Vietnam War|war in Vietnam]] (on constitutional grounds), and what he saw as the rampant illegalities and unconstitutionalities perpetrated by the administrations of [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Ronald Reagan]]. One favorite cause was his campaign to point out that, because the budget of the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] is classified, it violates the requirement of [[Article One of the United States Constitution|Article One of the Constitution]] that no moneys can be spent by the federal government except those specifically appropriated by Congress.{{citation needed|date=March 2013}}
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)