Reinhold Niebuhr was not, strictly speaking, a historian. While most of his writings after World War II make extensive use of historical illustration and are informed by his elaborate philosophy of history, they are less works of scholarship than tracts for the times, topical books using historical examples to bolster an argument about the direction of public policy. For that reason his works have dated quickly and have generally stood apart from the mainstream of postwar American historiography. His major historical contributions are embodied in two books, one a study of the philosophy of history which expresses in systematic form the moral quandaries of intellectuals in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the other an influential application of that philosophy to a problem in American history.

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri, and grew up in a succession of small Midwestern towns where his father...