HANDLIN, OSCAR

HANDLIN, OSCAR (1915– ), U.S. historian. Handlin, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, graduated from Brooklyn College in 1934 and a year later earned his master's degree at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1940 and taught history there from 1939. He directed the Center for the Study of Liberty at Cambridge, Massachusetts (1958–66), and in 1966 assumed the directorship of the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History. After his retirement, he became the Carl M. Loeb University Emeritus Professor of History at Harvard. A prolific writer, Handlin produced almost a book a year during his prodigious career. His works include the Pulitzer Prize-winning study of American immigrants, The Uprooted (1951), Boston's Immigrants (1941), Chance or Destiny (1955), Al Smith and His America (1958), The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (1959), The Americans (1963), Children of the Uprooted (1966), Statue of Liberty (1971), A Pictorial History of Immigration (1972), The Wealth of the American People (with his wife, Mary Handlin, 1975), Truth in History (1979), and The Distortion of America (1981). By applying sociological insights to historical research, Handlin brought new evidence to bear on many controversial issues in American history, such as the nature of the Populists, the origins of antisemitism, the economic foundations of colonial slavery, and the conservatism of American immigrants. A vice president of the American Jewish Historical Society, his contributions to American Jewish history include Danger in Discord: Origins of Anti-Semitism in the United States (with M. Handlin, 1948); Adventure in Freedom: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America (1954); "A Century of Jewish Immigration to the United States" (with M. Handlin), in AJYB, 50 (1948), 1–84; and American Jews: Their Story (1972). (Hans L. Trefousse / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)