Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. (born 1917) was an outstanding historian of the United States and an influential activist in the Democratic Party. What was unique was the extent to which he brought his scholarship to bear upon his partisan politics....

The American historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger (1888-1965) was one of the pioneers in the study of the social aspects of American history. Arthur M. Schlesinger was born in Xenia, Ohio, on Feb. 27, 1888, the son of a first-generation immigrant....

Since World War II, Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., has been perhaps the nation's most widely known and controversial historian. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, and several of his books have generated high sales and...

IT IS A great loss to lovers of serious history that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died this week at age 89, never devoted himself full-time to tempered accounts of the past. He was in his mid-20s when he wrote his provocative "Age of...

The history of liberalism in our times is not, for liberals, a happy one. Modern liberalism originated in the first third of the twentieth century, dominated the middle third, and then all but came apart in the final third. The simplest indicator...

On the evening of Monday, Sept. 17, Bank of America and PBS hosted a preview of Ken Burns’ new documentary The War, about how World War II affected American lives. After the screening, a silent, somber crowd filed into the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby...

The government's star witness at media mogul Conrad Black's fraud trial testified Tuesday that Black himself ordered millions of dollars paid to a smaller Toronto-based company he owned.F. David Radler's testimony was the first to tie Black directly to the transfer of tens of millions...

In the following excerpt, Engelhardt examines Schlesinger's concept of liberalism as it is developed in many of his writings, contending that Schlesinger, by maintaining a centrist position, has tried to value "realism more than idealism." Yet, Engelhardt argues, "by stressing the role of pragmatic intellectuals, he has made a fetish of empiricism … and has identified too closely with the existing power structure."

An American literary scholar whose works evidence his conservative principles, Lynn is the general editor of Houghton-Mifflin's "Riverside Literature" series and the author of numerous essays and books on American life and letters. In the following essay, Lynn censures Schlesinger for allowing his political loyalties to bias his historical accounts.

In the review below, Ahlstrom contends that the liberal, democratic outlook defined in Schlesinger's The Vital Center is based on a relativistic ethic that denies the fundamental tenets of the democratic system it advocates.