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62+ Works 1,449 Members 10 Reviews

About the Author

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Oscar Handlin received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he has taught since 1939 and was director of the Center for the Study of the History of Liberty until 1966. From 1979 to 1984, he was director of the university library at Harvard, and, after holding the show more Charles Warren chair in history for many years, in 1984 he became Charles M. Loeb University Professor. Handlin, who is a consensus historian and a strong advocate of civil rights, has written extensively on urban history and immigration. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 for The Uprooted (1951), his study of immigrants in the eastern cities of America written from the perspective of the immigrant. The son of immigrant parents himself, he made his special field of study the social history of immigrant groups who came to the United States in the nineteenth century from eastern and southern Europe. In The Americans (1963), as in others of his books, he dispensed with footnotes, bibliography, and identification of quotations in favor of "unobtrusive" learning. Handlin edited Children of the Uprooted (1966), which includes excerpts from various authors on the subject of the "marginality" of immigrants, and collaborated on a number of works with his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, Lillian. On the subject of education, he wrote The American University as an Instrument of Republican Culture (1970) and John Dewey's Challenge to Education: Historical Perspectives on the Cultural Context (1959). (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Series

Works by Oscar Handlin

Statue of Liberty (1700) 96 copies
Truth in History (1979) 85 copies
Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) — Editor — 72 copies
The historian and the city (1963) 44 copies
Al Smith and his America (1958) 39 copies
Children of the Uprooted (1966) 16 copies
From the Outer World (1997) 10 copies
America; a history (1967) 6 copies
The Distortion of America (1995) 4 copies
Dimensions of Liberty (1966) 3 copies
Introduction 1 copy

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This is one of those books I picked up in a library sale for twenty-five cents or something like that. Not sure what called me to pull it off the shelf where it stood with others in the Library of American Biography series. Oscar Handlin is generally remembered as an historian of ethnic, immigrant, and urban American; Lillian Handlin is best known for her series on liberty in America. A biography of Abraham Lincoln seems out of place on their C.V.s Written in 1980 it is somewhat dated. This book was not intended to be a scholarly contribution, but as an introductory synthetic work that tied together existing historiography for students and the layperson. They emphasized religion and Lincoln's evolving concepts of necessity and a divine being. They depict Lincoln as human being who struggled making decisions, and who often delayed or prevaricated when he saw no clear answer, policy, or solution. While this book has some merits, there has been some interesting Lincoln scholarship in the almost forty years since it was published.… (more)
 
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gregdehler | Dec 19, 2018 |
An informative and lively history of this monument.

Interesting stories of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, and Joseph Pulitzer.
 
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sunrise_hues | 1 other review | Jul 8, 2015 |
I bought this at the recommendation of a friend who's an historian, and I've never regretted. It's a volume that should be in the library of every educated American.
 
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jensenmk82 | Jan 9, 2013 |

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Works
62
Also by
8
Members
1,449
Popularity
#17,737
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
10
ISBNs
68
Languages
2

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