Word: historians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Franklin Roosevelt's legacy by reforming welfare and conquering runaway deficits while still showing how government could help average citizens. He's written a fascinating piece about what Roosevelt means today. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of a best-selling book on Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, is a great historian and a wonderful writer. Her biographical essay on Roosevelt captures, in a moving way, his personality and historic significance...
...view of the universe in which space and time were all relative. Indirectly, relativity paved the way for a new relativism in morality, arts and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space but also of truth and morality. "It formed a knife," historian Paul Johnson says of relativity theory, "to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings." Just as Darwinism became, a century ago, not just a biological theory but also a social theology, so too did relativity shape the social theology of the 20th century...
Factories, meanwhile, required workers to begin their days together: it's no coincidence that inexpensive alarm clocks and wristwatches began appearing at the end of the 1800s. "In the 19th century," says historian Michael O'Malley, author of Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, "we were urged to merge our sense of time with mechanical devices. It allowed for new forms of social organization...
...Paul Gray's review of historian Susan Dunn's Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light [BOOKS, Dec. 6]: as a Frenchman living in the U.S., I have had the opportunity to reflect on the respective merits and shortcomings of the two countries' revolutions. Dunn does not render sufficient justice to the particular challenges of the French Revolution. While the Reign of Terror was a sad phase in French history, it would probably have been difficult to avoid. The lessons drawn about the later emergence of Napoleon can also be considered from two perspectives: while some consider it an end point...
DIED. C. VANN WOODWARD, 91, Pulitzer-prizewinning historian and perceptive chronicler of the post-Civil War South; in Hamden, Conn. He was perhaps best known for The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which argued that segregation in the South was a fairly recent phenomenon and thus could be undone...