In Memoriam: John Higham

34 Historically Speaking November 2003 In Memoriam: John Higham John Higham, one ofthe most influential and honored American historians ofthe lasthalfofthe 20th century, died onJuly 26 in his Baltimore apartment. He was eighty-two years old and active as a scholar up to the evening before his death, fourteen years after his retirement from the Johns Hopkins University, where he was the John Martin Vincent Professor ofHistory. Born inJamaica, NewYork, in 1920,John was part of a generation of scholars whose view ofAmerica was complex, occasionally conflicted, and very much shaped by the extraordinary times in which they came of age and began their careers—the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. John graduated fromJohns Hopkins University, where he was something ofa student activist, in 1941. After receiving his degree he served inWorld War? in the Historical Division ofthe 12th Army Air Force in Italy. Upon his discharge he spent a year as an assistant editor ofH.L. Mencken's iconoclastic journal, American Mercury, founded twentyyears earUer. From there he moved to the University ofWisconsin, where he studied under Merle Curri and received his Ph.D. in 1949. Before his return to Hopkins in 1971 he held faculty positions at UCLA, Rutgers, Columbia, and the University ofMichigan, where he was Moses Coit Tyler University Professor of History and served as chair of the Program in American Culture. During thoseyears, in his time at Hopkins, and even after his retirement, John traveled widely. Long before recent talk about the "internationalization " ofU.S. history he was a powerful advocate for critical intellectual engagement across national borders. Having come to maturity during the Depression and World War II, John began his career in the heyday ofthe Cold War and McCarthyism. It is thus perhaps appropriate that this deeply moral man would take one of the ugliest strands in American culture, nativism, as the subject of his first book, Strangers in the Land: Patterns ofAmerican Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955). Yet while the post-World War II era may help explain some things aboutStrangers, it cannot explain the work's extraordinaryinfluence and durability . Nearly a half century after it first appeared in print, it is still the commanding book in the field. It was characteristic of John's commitment to inteUectual debate that he eventuaUy became a bit irritated with the reverential treatment oíStrangers and wrote his own critiques ofit and its reception. John followed Strangers by looking at more positive and cosmopolitan versions of American nationalism and the values and experiences of immigrants themselves. For this enterprise—and indeed for most of the rest ofhis career—John's preferred pubUcation was the essay, a form at which he was a master. Few historians have written so many thoughtful, influential articles on so manydifferent subjects. Even fewer have fared as well when those essays were gathered in collections such asJohn's Send These toMe:Jewsand OtherImmigrants in UrbanAmerica (1975). The Une ofresearch pursued byJohn from Strangersthroughhiswritings on ethnicityand nationaUsm marked an intervention in recent debates over "pluraUsm" before such debates existed. Italso putJohn indie position ofbeing a major figure in die studyofimmigration and edinicity, a role acknowledged byhis election to the presidencyofthe Immigration History Society in 1979 and by his receipt ofa Lifetime AchievementAward from that organization in 2002. In the sameyear he also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Historical Association. John's influence extended to at least two other fields. The first is intellectual history, where he led in partbyexample, as inhis early and prescientfusion ofthe analysis ofhigh and popular culture. He, alongwith Paul Conkin, also organized the famous Wingspread Conference on the subject, out ofwhich came a remarkable coUection ofessays, New Directions inAmerican IntellectualHistory (1979), a work thathelped shape and anticipate the course of the field over the next two decades. In yet a third areaJohn likewise made a major mark: understanding the history, practice , and craft ofAmerican historical writing. One ofhis classic essays, "Beyond Consensus: The Historian asMoral Critic" (1962), labeled and defined the then current "Consensus School" ofhistoriography, analyzed its shortcomings , and exhorted historians to examine the moral impUcations oftheirwork. Formany ofus in graduate school during the 1960s, it was a bolt ofUghtning, iUuminating...