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.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. was born in 1917 with the name Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger, later changed by dropping his mother's maiden name and taking his father's full name. This emulation was one of many in the most famous father-son combination in the history of American historians, for Schlesinger Jr. was raised in the home of one of the leading historians of the 1920s and 1930s. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. taught one of the first college courses in American social and cultural history (in the early 1920s), pioneered in the scholarship of social history, and, as a professor at Harvard between the two world wars, directed the graduate work of several students...