| Gertrude Himmelfarb | |
|---|---|
| Born | Gertrude Himmelfarb 8 August 1922 Brooklyn, New York |
| Pen name | Bea Kristol |
| Nationality | USA |
| Citizenship | USA |
| Alma mater | Brooklyn College (B.A. 1942), University of Chicago (M.A. 1944, Ph.D. 1950) Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1939-42) Girton College (1946-47)[1] |
| Notable award(s) | Fellow of the British Academy Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of the Royal Historical Society Fellow of the Society of American Historians Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1982-1988) Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress (1984-2008) Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson Center (1985–1996) Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute (1987-Present) Jefferson Lecture (1991) National Humanities Medal (2004) |
| Spouse(s) | Irving Kristol |
| Children | William Kristol Elizabeth Nelson |
| Relative(s) | parents Max and Bertha (Lerner) Himmelfarb brother Milton Himmelfarb |
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Gertrude Himmelfarb (born August 8, 1922), also known as Bea Kristol, is an American historian. She has written extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.
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Gertrude Himmelfarb received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn college in 1942 and her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. She also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and at Girton College, Cambridge University. In 1942, she married Irving Kristol , known as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, and has two children, Elizabeth Nelson and William Kristol, a political commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard.
Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. She has served on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1991 she delivered the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004 she received the National Humanities Medal awarded by the President.
Himmelfarb is a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices. Her book The New History and the Old (published in 1987 and revised and expanded in 2004) is a critique of the varieties of "new history" that have sought to displace the old: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history but relies on partial and dubious data;[3][4] Marxist history derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the actual protagonists and events of history;[5] psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence;[6] analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure;[7] social history, "history from the bottom," that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history);[8][9][10] and, most recently, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.[11]
Himmelfarb criticized A.J.P. Taylor for seeking to “demoralize” history in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, and for refusing to recognize "moral facts" about interwar Europe.[12] Himmelfarb maintained that Taylor was wrong to treat Hitler as a "normal" German leader playing by the traditional rules of diplomacy in The Origins of the Second World War instead of being a "world-historical" figure like Napoleon.[12]
Himmelfarb is best known as a historian of Victorian England. But she puts that period in a larger context. The Idea of Poverty opens with an extended analysis of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, who helped shape the debates and policies throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Victorian Minds features such eighteenth-century "proto-Victorians" as Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham, concluding with the "last Victorian," John Buchan, whose novels depict a twentieth century imbued with Victorian values. The Moral Imagination ranges from Burke to Winston Churchill and Lionel Trilling, with assorted Victorians and non-Victorians in between. On Looking into the Abyss has modern culture and society in the forefront and the Victorians in the background, while One Nation, Two Cultures is entirely about American culture and society. The Roads to Modernity enlarges the perspective of the Enlightenment, both chronologically and nationally, placing the British Enlightenment in opposition to the French and in accord with the American. Most recently, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot and The People of the Book focus on attitudes to Jews, Judaism, and Zionism in England from their readmission in the seventeenth century to the present.
And so with scores of essays demonstrating that Victorian "values" – "virtues," she calls them – were not unique to that time and place. "The Victorian Ethos: Before and after Victoria," is the title of one essay;[13] "Victorianism before Victoria" are the opening words of another.[14] The word "Victorian" today has a disagreeable and crabbed connotation, conjuring up repressive sexual and social mores. Himmelfarb humanizes and democratizes that concept.. In an interview after receiving the National Humanities Medal, she explained that the Victorian virtues – prudence, temperance, industriousness, decency, responsibility – were thoroughly pedestrian. "They depended on no special breeding, talent, sensibility, or even money. They were common, everyday virtues, within the capacity of ordinary people. They were the virtues of citizens, not of heroes or saints – and of citizens of democratic countries, not aristocratic ones."[15] Himmelfarb has argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values (she prefers the term 'virtues'), such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self-reliance, into American political life and policy-making".[16]
Although Himmelfarb is often identified as a conservative, in Britain one of her most outspoken admirers is Gordon Brown, the former Labour Party Prime Minister. His introduction to the British edition of Roads to modernity opens: "I have long admired Gertrude Himmelfarb's historical work, in particular her love of the history of ideas, and her work has stayed with me ever since I was a history student at Edinburgh University."[17]