John Higham

John William Higham (26 October 1920 - 26 July 2003) was an American historian, scholar of American culture and specialist on issues of ethnicity.^[1]

Life and career

Born in Jamaica, Queens, Higham earned his undergraduate history degree from Johns Hopkins in 1941 and received a master's degree from Yale University in 1942. In World War II, he served with the historical division of the Army Air Corps in Italy. He married psychologist Eileen Moss Higham in 1948.

After serving as assistant editor of The American Mercury, he earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1949. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Rutgers University, Columbia University and the University of Michigan before returning to Johns Hopkins in 1971.

He is noted for having described anti-Catholicism in the United States as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history".^[2]

Higham died of a cerebral aneurysm in Baltimore.^[3]

Works

• Strangers in the Land, Patterns of American Nativism (1860-1925), Rutgers University Press, 1955. (Atheneum, 1963, [1981 - 21st Printing])
• Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
• John Higham - Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, Yale University Press, 2001. Three decades of writings.

References

External links

• John Higham: In Memoriam