Merle Eugene Curti (September 15, 1897 – March 9, 1996) was an American progressive historian who influenced peace studies,

intellectual history Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualization, conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of ...

and

social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...

, including by using

cliometrics Cliometrics (, also ), sometimes called 'new economic history' or 'econometric history', is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history (especially social a ...

(quantitative tools in historical research). At

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

and for decades at the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Uni ...

, Curti directed 86 finished Ph.D. dissertations and had a wide range of correspondents. He was known for his commitment to democracy, as well as the Turnerian thesis that social and economic forces shape American life, thought and character.

Early life and education

Curti was born in Papillion, Nebraska, a suburb of

Omaha Omaha ( ) is the List of cities in Nebraska, most populous city in the U.S. state of Nebraska. It is located in the Midwestern United States along the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's List of United S ...

, on September 15, 1897. His parents were John Eugene Curti, an immigrant from Switzerland, and Alice Hunt, a

Yankee The term ''Yankee'' and its contracted form ''Yank'' have several interrelated meanings, all referring to people from the United States. Their various meanings depend on the context, and may refer to New Englanders, the Northeastern United Stat ...

from

Vermont Vermont () is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, New York (state), New York to the west, and the Provinces and territories of Ca ...

. Curti attended high school in Omaha then obtained a bachelor's degree in 1920 from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, graduating ''

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sout ...

''. He then spent a year studying in France where he met Margaret Wooster (1898–1963) who had a Ph.D. from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

and was a pioneer in research on child psychology. They married in 1925 and had two daughters. Curti received his Ph.D. in 1927 from Harvard as one of the last students of

Frederick Jackson Turner Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 – March 14, 1932) was an American historian during the early 20th century, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until 1910, and then Harvard University. He was known primarily for his front ...

Academic career

While at Smith College, Curti published his first book, ''The American Peace Crusade, 1815–1860'' (1929). 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 essentially an early version of ''The Growth of American Thought.'' Curti taught at

Beloit College Beloit College is a private liberal arts college in Beloit, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1846 when Wisconsin was still a territory, it is the state's oldest continuously operated college. It has an enrollment of roughly 1,000 undergradua ...

Smith College Smith College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smit ...

, and

, then in 1942 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he taught for 25 years. He also taught in Japan, Australia, and India, and lectured throughout Europe.

Peace studies

Moving to

Teachers College Teachers College, Columbia University (TC) is the graduate school of education affiliated with Columbia University, a private research university in New York City. Founded in 1887, Teachers College has been a part of Columbia University since ...

at Columbia in 1931, he published a book on

William Jennings Bryan William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860 – July 26, 1925) was an American lawyer, orator, and politician. He was a dominant force in the History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, running three times as the party' ...

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 and conflict studies Peace and conflict studies is a social science field that identifies and analyzes violence, violent and nonviolence, nonviolent behaviors as well as the structural violence, structural mechanisms attending Conflict (process), conflicts (including ...

as a field of study. He criticized pacifists for ignoring major social changes—especially the repudiation of old-fashioned competitive capitalism by the

New Deal The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression in the United States, Great Depressi ...

, and the need to repudiate imperial greed if peace were to be achieved. In 1964 he helped found the Conference on Peace Research in History, now called the Peace History Society. ''The Roots of American Loyalty'' (1946) was a history of patriotism. Curti developed his global vision through travels; he taught in Japan, Australia and India for two years. He left the Episcopal faith of his boyhood for Unitarianism. Although never a Marxist, he voted for Socialist presidential candidates in the name of world peace.

Intellectual history

Curti turned his attention to

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 encyclopedic 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) Unlike some of the other leaders of the American Studies program, he paid little attention to myths and symbols. Unlike Perry Miller at Harvard, who strongly influenced a new generation of intellectual historians, Curti never delved too deeply into the internal

history of ideas Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual hist ...

, preferring to link them to multiple external social and economic factors. 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 from the bottom up.

New social history

In the 1950s Curti undertook a collaborative social history of rural Trempealeau County, Wisconsin using avant-garde 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'' (1959) immediately became a pioneer work in what would soon be dubbed the "new social history." Curti's wife Margaret Wooster Curti, provided some of the quantitative methodology. Historians, however, did not emulate it, preferring instead to follow Stephan Thernstrom's model in ''Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century American City'' (1964), which used a similar methodology of tracking workers through their careers using censuses and city directories. The difference was urban and rural—urban history was exploding, and rural history was a backwater; in addition, the Thernstrom model was easier to replicate by a graduate student writing a Ph.D. thesis alone (Curti had numerous research assistants and coauthors). Whereas the "old" social history comprised descriptions of everyday lifestyles, perhaps with a coverage of grass roots political movements (like the Populists), Curti's "new" social history was a systematic examination of the entire population using statistics and social science methodologies.

Teaching

In 1942, Curti was called to the Frederick Jackson Turner Professorship of History at the University of Wisconsin, one of the nation's most influential centers of historical scholarship; he retired from the department in 1968. Curti continued to write after retirement, keeping up to date his influential textbook ''Rise of the American Nation'' (1st ed. 1950), coauthored with Lewis Todd, which went through many editions after their deaths. The Wisconsin department of history was notorious for the angry feuds among the senior professors, which Curti, mild-mannered and small of stature, completely ignored. Curti supervised 86 finished doctoral dissertations at Columbia and Wisconsin, including many who became well-known scholars:

Richard Hofstadter Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historic ...

social Darwinism Charles Darwin, after whom social Darwinism is named Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economi ...

; John Higham on nativism; Bourke on community studies; Allen Davis on Progressivism and

Jane Addams Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860May 21, 1935) was an American Settlement movement, settlement activist, Social reform, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was a leader in the history of s ...

; and Roderick Nash on the environment. Curti allowed his students a free hand in content and methodology. He encouraged his students constantly, wrote highly detailed critiques of their chapters, protected them from intradepartmental feuds, helped them get funding, and found them jobs through the "old boys" network of which he was an accomplished maestro, writing hundreds of letters a month to friends and ex-students across the globe.

Memberships, awards and honors

Curti won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1944 for ''The Growth of American Thought'' (1943). He was president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now the

Organization of American Historians The Organization of American Historians (OAH), formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, is the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history. OAH's members in the U.S. and abroad incl ...

) in 1952 and the

American Historical Association The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world, claiming over 10,000 members. Founded in 1884, AHA works to protect academic free ...

in 1954. He was a co-founder of the

American Studies Association The American Studies Association (ASA) is a scholarly organization devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture, U.S. culture and American history, history. It was founded in 1951 and claims to be the oldest scholarly organization d ...

. 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 also a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

. In 1977 the

established the Merle Curti Award, which is given annually for the best book in social, intellectual, and/or cultural history. (In some years, the organization has awarded two prizes, one in social and/or cultural history and one in intellectual and/or cultural history.)

Selected works

* ''The American Peace Crusade, 1815–1860'' (1929) * "Non-Resistance in New England," ''The New England Quarterly'' Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1929), pp. 34–5
in JSTOR
*''Bryan and World Peace.'' Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Studies in History, (1931). * "Robert Rantoul, Jr., The Reformer in Politics," ''The New England Quarterly'' Vol. 5, No. 2 (Apr., 1932), pp. 264–28
in JSTOR
* ''The Social ideas of American Educators'' (1932, expanded ed. 1959) *''Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936'' (1936). * "The Great Mr. Locke: America's Philosopher, 1783–1861," ''The Huntington Library Bulletin'' No. 11 (Apr., 1937), pp. 107–151 * "Public Opinion and the Study of History," ''The Public Opinion Quarterly'' Vol. 1, No. 2 (Apr., 1937), pp. 84–8
in JSTOR
* "Francis Lieber and Nationalism," ''The Huntington Library Quarterly'' Vol. 4, No. 3 (Apr., 1941), pp. 263–29
in JSTOR
* "The American Scholar in Three Wars," ''Journal of the History of Ideas,'' Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jun., 1942), pp. 241–26
in JSTOR
*''The Growth of American Thought.'' (1943, 1951), 912 pp. * ''The University of Wisconsin A History 1848–1945'' (3 vols., 1949–1994), with Vernon Rosco Carstenson, Edmund David Cronon, and John William Jenkins. * ''The Roots of American Loyalty'' (1946) * "The Reputation of America Overseas (1776–1860)," ''American Quarterly'' Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1949), pp. 58–8
in JSTOR
* "America at the World Fairs, 1851–1893," ''The American Historical Review'' Vol. 55, No. 4 (Jul., 1950), pp. 833–85
in JSTOR
* "The Immigrant and the American Image in Europe, 1860–1914," with Kendall Birr; ''The Mississippi Valley Historical Review'' Vol. 37, No. 2 (Sep., 1950), pp. 203–23
in JSTOR
* "The Democratic Theme in American Historical Literature," ''The Mississippi Valley Historical Review'' Vol. 39, No. 1 (Jun., 1952), pp. 3–28, presidential address
in JSTOR
* "'The Flowery Flag Devils': The American Image in China 1840–1900." with John Stalker; ''Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society'' Vol. 96, No. 6 (Dec., 1952), pp. 663–69
in JSTOR
* "Human Nature in American Thought," ''Political Science Quarterly'' Vol. 68, No. 3 (Sep., 1953), pp. 354–37
in JSTOR
* "Human Nature in American Thought: Retreat from Reason in the Age of Science," ''Political Science Quarterly'' Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec., 1953), pp. 492–51
in JSTOR
* "Intellectuals and Other People," ''The American Historical Review'' Vol. 60, No. 2 (Jan., 1955), pp. 259–282, presidential addres
in JSTOR
* "Woodrow Wilson's Concept of Human Nature," ''Midwest Journal of Political Science'' Vol. 1, No. 1 (May, 1957), pp. 1–1
in JSTOR
* "American Philanthropy and the National Character," ''American Quarterly'' Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1958), pp. 420–43
in JSTOR
*''The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County.'' (1959). * "Tradition and Innovation in American Philanthropy," ''Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society'' Vol. 105, No. 2 (Apr., 1961), pp. 146–15
in JSTOR
* "Jane Addams on Human Nature," ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' Vol. 22, No. 2 (Apr., 1961), pp. 240–25
in JSTOR
* "The Changing Concept of "Human Nature" in the Literature of American Advertising," ''The Business History Review'' Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1967), pp. 335–357, illustrated
in JSTOR
* ''Human Nature in American Thought: A History'' (1980) * ''American Philanthropy Abroad'' (Jan. 1, 1988) * ''Rise of the American Nation'', textbook coauthored with Lewis Paul Todd (1950–1982); many editions.

References

External links

Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians
{{DEFAULTSORT:Curti, Merle 20th-century American historians American intellectual historians American social historians Historians of the United States American studies scholars Peace and conflict scholars Pulitzer Prize for History winners Harvard University alumni Beloit College faculty Smith College faculty Teachers College, Columbia University faculty Presidents of the American Historical Association 20th-century American male writers People from Papillion, Nebraska Members of the American Philosophical Society American male non-fiction writers American people of Swiss descent 1897 births 1996 deaths