Oscar Handlin
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 6, 2012, the following Minute was placed upon the records. Oscar Handlin, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Emeritus, was the most influential and creative historian of American social life in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, steeped in the lore and learning of Jewish culture, he developed in his youngest years a passion for learning—learning, as he wrote again and again, for its own sake, simply to know and understand the world and its people. It was that passion that led him into and out of a Yeshiva in Brooklyn, through his studies at Brooklyn College, through years of encyclopedic reading in the Brooklyn and New York Public Libraries, and that led him finally to Harvard, which he considered the national citadel of learning. He entered the Harvard...