Arthur Schlesinger Interview

“Schlesinger learns history from his progressive and brilliant parents. At age 11, his mother tells him to stop interrupting at the dinner table, and he retorts, "Mother, how can I be quiet if you insist on making statements that are not factually accurate?" Although his parents are devoted to the public schools, the Cambridge schools are weak; one day, when young Arthur announces "that our teacher had told us that people in Albania were called Albinos because they had white hair and red eyes," his father gives up, and sends him to Exeter. During World War II, he is turned down by the Navy as a security risk (because his father was so anti-Nazi so early!), gets a military intelligence job instead, and later lands a job teaching at Harvard, holding only a B.A.”

- Goodbye to a great American: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr

An interview with the late historian by ABC’s Late Night Line made last year. Listen to the podcast (available for limited time).

Related;
History, Written in the Present Tense
Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89
At the Roots of Democracy; review of Age of Jackson

"Mr. Schlesinger's service, performed not merely adequately but brilliantly, is to reinterpret Jacksonian democracy in the light of an immense body of facts which had previously been ignored. Examining the politics of the era not in terms of "party battles" but of animated ideas, he makes the period far more richly instructive. The whole force of the Jacksonian movement takes a new orientation. Mr. Schlesinger argues that it stemmed more largely from the Eastern working man than the Western settler: that it was more intimately connected with the Industrial Revolution than with the trans-Appalachian frontier. Jackson, as he puts it, struck fire with the working classes because he seemed to them the embodiment of political democracy. There was plenty of radicalism in the West, but it was the spasmodic and opportunistic radicalism of an unstable society, where men might enjoy prosperity one year and wilt under hand times the next. The discontented Eastern workers, however, developed a stable and permanently fruitful body of radical doctrine."

Arthur Schlesinger: 'War and the American Presidency'