“The individual who loses his memory doesn’t know where he came from or where he’s going and he becomes dislocated and disoriented. “History is to the nation much as memory is to the individual,” Schlesinger says. Throughout his career as a historian, Schlesinger has been committed to the idea that Americans need to understand their history in order to ensure the continued success of the American experiment. Kennedy in the White House, which again brought Schlesinger a Pulitzer Prize. His account of his years in the White House resulted in perhaps his best-known book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy, an opportunity for which Schlesinger resigned his Harvard professorship. This political participation earned him in an appointment as a special advisor to President John F. He was also active in national Democratic Party politics during those years, taking leaves from Harvard to advise Democratic presidential candidates in 1952, 1956, and 1960. While teaching at Harvard during the forties and fifties, Schlesinger continued to produce important works of history, including three volumes in a series on the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. The Age of Jackson was a best-seller and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, landing Schlesinger an appointment as an associate professor at Harvard despite the fact that he had never earned a Ph.D. Schlesinger argued that Jacksonian democracy was a dramatic change for the better because it introduced the idea that individuals should be protected from business interests by a strong central government.
That book was followed by The Age of Jackson in 1945, a celebrated history that challenged the way the Jacksonian era was previously interpreted by historians. Schlesinger is the author of sixteen books published over the six decades since Orestes Brownson appeared in 1939. He has been carrying on the family tradition ever since. That’s when his Harvard senior thesis became his first book, Orestes Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress. Her maiden name was Bancroft and she was related to George Bancroft, a great American historian of the nineteenth century.” Schlesinger carried on the family tradition, becoming a published historian at the tender age of twenty-two. Not only my father, but also my mother was a historian. “I grew up in a household that was saturated with history. Or so Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., laughingly conceded recently. History, it seems, is not only in the facts, but also in the genes.
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