Leon Litwack
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Categories: 1929 births | Living people | American academics | American historians | American textbook writers | Historians of the United States | Pulitzer Prize for History winners | University of California, Berkeley faculty
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BiographyLitwack was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1929, and received his B.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California. He has also taught at the Universities of Wisconsin and South Carolina and at Colorado College. Litwack's interest in history was sparked by The Growth of the American Republic, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. Litwack said, "The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases.(I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library—and to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."[2] From 1964 to 2007, Litwack taught at the University of California in Berkeley, where he instructed more than 30,000 students. [3] For much of that time, he taught the introductory course in post-Civil War American History, and was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History. Litwack gave his final lecture as a professor, "Fight the Power," on Monday, May 7, 2007 in Wheeler Auditorium. [4] Besides the Pulitzer Prize in History, he has received many honors in recognition of his distinguished and path-breaking scholarship, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the American Book Award, and election to the presidency of the Organization of American Historians. Litwack has also been an enormously popular and influential teacher, receiving two distinguished teaching awards.[5] Litwack was also presented with the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2007 by the [ASUC] at the University of California, Berkeley. [6] He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Film Grant, with which he produced To Look for America in 1971. He followed up his groundbreaking book on Reconstruction, Been in the Storm So Long, with Trouble in Mind, which continued his investigation of race relations into the early-20th Century. Litwack is currently writing a sequel to Trouble in Mind focusing on black southerners and race relations from the 1930s to 1955.[7] A distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians, Litwack lectures on these topics:
Books by Leon F. Litwack (partial listing)
Interview with Leon F. LitwackQuotes"So what else is there to say but everything. And Fight the Power. And 'Go Bears!' "- May 7, 2007 to close his final lecture. Citations{1}Michael Les Benedict. "Review of Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, H-Law, H-Net Reviews, March, 2002. URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=73411015347997. |
