Writing American history;: Essays on modern scholarship

by John Higham

207 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

John William Higham (26 October 1920 - 26 July 2003) was an American historian, scholar of American culture and specialist on issues of ethnicity.

Born in Jamaica, Queens, Higham earned his undergraduate history degree from Johns Hopkins in 1941 and received a master's degree from Yale University in 1942. In World War II, he served with the historical division of the Army Air Corps in Italy. He married psychologist Eileen Moss Higham in 1948.

After serving as assistant editor of The American Mercury, he earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1949. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Rutgers University, Columbia University and the University of Michigan before returning to Johns Hopkins in 1971.

He is noted for having described anti-Catholicism in the United States as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history".

Higham died of a cerebral aneurysm in Baltimore.

Reviews

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read about 100 pages of this for class. Higham gives a pretty insightful overview of the arbitrary divide between humanities, social sciences, and arts in the United States, and how funding plays a crucial role in these divisions. Higham's sections on historiography are dated now, since 50 years of historical research and the rise of postmodernism have really changed how the practice of history is carried out. The book still has value as a map of past historical trends, though - including how Higham uses "men" and other male-gendered language to describe academic history.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yawn. The essential reading of historians in training. Bring a box of no-doze and a cup of coffee to wash it down.