| Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism In this book, the distinguished historian Carl Schorske--author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siécle Vienna --draws together a series of essays that reveal the changing place of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century cultures. In most intellectual and artistic fields, Schorske argues, twentieth-century Europeans and Americans have come to do their thinking without history. Modern art, modern architecture, modern music, modern science--all have defined themselves not as emerging from or even reacting against the past, but as detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space. This is in stark contrast to the historicism of the nineteenth century, he argues, when ideas about the past pervaded most fields of thought from philosophy and politics to art, music, and literature. However, Schorske also shows that the nineteenth century's attachment to thinking with history and the modernist way of thinking without history are more than just antitheses. They are different ways of trying to address the problems of modernity, to give shape and meaning to European civilization in the era of industrial capitalism and mass politics. Carl Emil Schorske was born in the Bronx, New York on March 15, 1915. He received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a master's degree from Harvard University before serving in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. After the war, he returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. He taught at several universities including the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and Wesleyan University. In 1966, he was one of 10 "great teachers" pictured on the cover of Time magazine. He wrote several books during his lifetime including Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. In 1981, he received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was among the first class of recipients of a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius award. He died on September 13, 2015 at the age of 100. (Bowker Author Biography) |