In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually may have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.Īs a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership.

He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944) The American Political Tradition (1948) The Age of Reform (1955) Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays continue to illuminate contemporary history. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimen Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University.

Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University.

America at 1750 by Richard Hofstadter