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Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998) was an American historian. As one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, with 40 books and 700 essays and reviews, he helped define modern liberalism in the United States. In the 1940s and 1950s, Commager was noted for his campaigns against McCarthyism and other abuses of government power. With his Columbia University colleague Allan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support for Adlai E. Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, and John F. Kennedy in 1960. He opposed the Vietnam War and was an outspoken critic of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan and what he viewed as their abuses of presidential power. His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950), which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s, and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). In addition, he edited a widely used compilation, Documents of American History; ten editions were published between 1938 and 1988, the last coedited with Commager's former student, Milton Cantor. Background Commager was born Henry Irving Commager on October 25, 1902, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of James Williams and Anne Elizabeth (Dan) Commager. After his mother died when he was ten, he was raised by his maternal grandfather in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the University of Chicago and earned degrees in history: Bachelor of Philosophy (1923), Master of Arts (1924), and Doctor of Philosophy (1928). He lived in Copenhagen for a year researching his dissertation on the political reform movement in Denmark led by Johann Friedrich Struensee. Commager married Evan Alexa Carroll (died 1968) of South Carolina in 1928. The couple had three children: Henry Steele Commager Jr. (1932–1984), known as Steele Commager, who became a classicist at Columbia University and wrote one of the leading books on the Roman poet Horace; Elizabeth Carroll Commager; and Nellie Thomas McColl Commager (now Nell Lasch, wife of the historian Christopher Lasch). Evan Commager wrote several books, including Cousins, Tenth Birthday, Beaux, and Valentine. In 1979, Commager married Mary Powlesland, a professor in Latin American studies, in Linton, England. Commager died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-five on March 2, 1998, in Amherst. Career Commager originally studied Danish history, and wrote his PhD dissertation on the Danish philosopher Johann Friedrich Struensee, a major reformer during the 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. He retired in 1992 from the John Woodruff Simpson Lectureship, and died, aged 95, in 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 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 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 Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. Textbooks and editing Commager was coauthor, with Samuel Eliot Morison, of the widely used history text The Growth of the American Republic (1930; 1937; 1942; 1950, 1962; 1969; 7th ed., with William E. Leuchtenburg, 1980; abridged editions in 1980 and 1983 under the title Concise History of the American Republic). His anthology, Documents of American History (1938), reaching its tenth edition (co-edited with his former student Milton Cantor) in 1988, half a century after its first appearance, remains a standard collection work of primary sources. His two documentary histories, The Blue and the Gray and The Spirit of Seventy-Six (the latter co-edited with his longtime friend and Columbia colleague Richard B. Morris), are comprehensive collections of primary sources on the Civil War and the American Revolution as seen by participants. With Richard B. Morris, he also co-edited the highly influential New American Nation Series, a multi-volume collaborative history of the United States under whose aegis appeared many significant and prize-winning works of historical scholarship. (This series was a successor to the American Nation series planned and edited at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart.) At Columbia, Commager mentored a series of distinguished historians who earned their PhD degrees under his tutelage, including Harold Hyman, Leonard W. Levy, and William E. Leuchtenburg. They joined together in 1967 to present him with a festschrift, or commemorative collection of essays, dedicated to him, titled Freedom and Reform (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). When he moved to Amherst, an elite undergraduate college, he no longer mentored PhD candidates, but he mentored undergraduates, including R. B. Bernstein, who later became a historian of the U.S. Constitution and a specialist in the era of the American Revolution. Liberalism Commager felt a duty as a professional historian to reach out to his fellow citizens. He believed that an educated public that und.... Discover the Henry Steele popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Henry Steele books.