Faculty Profile

Whether to endure one lecturer's passion for reciting dates, or to be clubbed over the head with the personal opinions of another-this is the classic dilemma of History students in search of a good course. Page one of any book on Education says that this should not be so, but the teaching of history's mazes is understandably jammed with recounters of obscure events, and with lecturers who ride private hobby horses down the long sweep of History. That Professor Crane Brinton has synthesized rather than compromised these extremes is a viewpoint that surprising numbers of otherwise unwarlike History concentrators will advance belligerently.

Even strangers to the field, watching to affable, silver-haired historian establish connections between the cold facts of time past and the alive, present-day ideas that spring from them, feel that here is a born historian. Actually, Professor Brinton came to Harvard in 1915 from his home in Connecticut(where he was born in 1808), wavering between English and History. "But English A decided that question-it scared me off," he says, a touch ruefully.

This decision allowed him to go into History with an enthusiasm stimulated by childhood readings in the historical novels of Henry. He sailed through graduating in 1919, and making Phi Beta Kappa along with his classmate, Professor Gordon Allport. "The modern era with its closeness of instructor and student was beginning to supplant the old one, in which professors were in the main people apart." Another undoubtedly invigorating circumstance was the fact of having Harold Laski for a tutor for three years. "Since I was influenced strongly and simultaneously by Laski and by Irvin Babbitt, who with his theories of 'inner cheeks' you might call Conservative, a tug of war ensued in me. It ended with my becoming what some people have called a fence sitter."

Enough people felt otherwise about this, how ever, for him to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship. He prefaced his stay at Oxford by a year of Knocking around France, and reinforcing thereby his interest in modern European history. The subsequent life at Oxford was a wonderful experience. "I was thrown on my own to study as I wished. And the social side of it was pleasant-lots of good, easy going conversation." Professor Brinton's rate of absorption was patently prodigious-his Ph.D. thesis, "Political Ideas in the English Romantic Period," got a gratifying reception, and is still a much-used work in the field.

Subsequently he produced his brilliant studies, "The Jacobins," "A Decade of Revolution," "The Anatomy of Revolution," and "Nietzsche." Though they bristle with original insights, much painfully close research went into them: for "The Jacobins" he read the minutes of their meetings verbatim, and can produce the uncanny effect of conveying his audience into a hot Jacobin policy session. Which, with a group of non-illusioned Harvard men is the neatest trick of the term.

Thoroughly on top of his subject, Professor Brinton currently ranges from a General Education course in the Social Sciences to an intensive, in-close consideration of the history of France and Western Europe. Wonder at his organic grasp of these many levels has sent many a man sidling into local book-stores to ask hesitatingly for some novels by Henty.