Arthur Jr Schlesinger (Arthur Meier Jr Schlesinger) Biography

American historian, born in Columbus, Ohio, educated at Harvard, where he began his academic career; in 1966 he became Albert Schweitzer Professor in Humanities at the City University of New York. He was special assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1964. The Age of Jackson (1945) won a Pulitzer Prize; its rejection of widely held assumptions on the early nineteenth-century development of the USA established his reputation as an admired and provocative historian. The Age of Roosevelt, generally regarded as the most authoritative history of the USA from 1930 to 1945, comprises The Crisis of the Old Order (1957), The Coming of the New Deal (1959), and The Politics of Upheaval (1960). He received a second Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days (1965), a study of the Kennedy administration; his disillusionment with the course of American politics under Johnson is clear from the critique of American involvement in Vietnam in The Bitter Heritage (1967) and the essays collected as The Crisis of Confidence (1969). Notable among his many other works are Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (1978), and The Cycles of American History (1986), essays on the fluctuations of American liberalism.