OSCAR HANDLIN

Oscar Handlin was the most influential and creative historian of American social life in the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in Brooklyn in 1915, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who ran a small grocery store. While enjoying ordinary life in the Brooklyn streets he became steeped in Jewish culture, and developed a passion for learning -- learning, as he later wrote again and again, for its own sake, simply to know and understand the world and its people. He was unique in his understanding and explanation of history. It was not for him an assemblage of information but a form of intellection, a cognitive process, which he expressed year after year in his books and articles and in the classroom as well. His lectures were unique. They contained little descriptive information. They were analyses of the structures of events and developments and the configurations they formed that explained how things came to be the way they were.