Carl Becker's name is legendary as a prolific historian, philosopher of history, and president of the American Historical Association. Becker's lifespan encompassed the era of disintegration of historical thought in the Western world; and, after 1940, he foreshadowed the beginning of its reintegration following the Second World War. Because he was possibly the greatest American stylist of the 20th Century, his seminal works have been reprinted many times, and still enrapture readers.

As Harold T. Parker tells us in Great Historians of the Modern Age, "He applied his psychological and literary gifts to the writing of several major histories and to three issues that concerned his gereration: epistemology, or the nature and validity of historical knowledge; the idea of progress; and the prospects of the United States as an experiment in democracy." Michael Kammen, the editor of "What Is the Good of History?" (1973), which is a collection of Becker's letters, says that he was a compassionate and unpretentious teacher who was most interested in studying how people's minds seem to work.

Becker's major works include his Ph.D. dissertation, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York: 1760-1776 (1909, 1968); Eve of Revolution (1918), about how Colonial Americans "felt" about what they did; The United States: An Experiment in Democracy (1920, 1927); The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922), on the interplay of intellectuals' and popular ideas and revolutionary psychology; a popular high school textbook, Modern History: The Rise of a Democratic, Scientific, and Industrialized Civilization (1931); Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (1935, 1966); Cornell University: Founders and the Founding (1943); Benjamin Franklin (1946).

Besides these volumes on American history, Becker wrote one of the most widely discussed books ever published on the nature of the Enlightenment: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosphers (1932, 1959, 24th printing, 1964), which he dedicated to his teachers, Charles Homer Haskins and Frederick Jackson Turner. The "Becker Thesis" was that the Enlightenment was not very modern; instead, the "climate of opinion" of the Enlightement's century made it closer to the 13th Century than to the 20th because the philosophers "demolished the Heavenly City of Saint Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials".

Originally a series of four lectures delivered at Yale Law School, Becker's Heavenly City was a dynamite volume that became a classic. Twenty-four years after its appearance and thirteen years after Becker's death, it was vigorously discussed and critiqued at a symposium held at Colgate University on October 13, 1956, as a phase of the annual meeting of the New York State Association of European Historians. The symposium papers were published as Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited (1958, reprinted 1968), edited by Raymond O. Rockwood.

Parker and Becker

Harold Parker studied with Becker at Cornell University in 1929-30, so his memories of being his student are from the era when Becker philosophically was a historical relativist, had already published significant books on American history, and was working on a Western Civilization textbook for high school students.

Parker's description of Becker's teaching load shows us what Becker did besides write eighteen books and corrects the suggestion presented at the symposium that Becker was unfamiliar with European history when he wrote The Heavenly City. Despite the fact that he was one of the outstanding graduate educators of all time, Becker was also seriously engaged in teaching history to high school and undergraduate college students. What an inspiring teacher he must have been for Parker to have such vivid memories of Becker's teaching methodology sixty-five or so years later!

Parker recalls: "Becker's teaching load was light: a fifty-minute lecture, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons at 3 p.m. to the sophomore class in modern European history; in the autumn semester, on Tuesday and Thursday, a 3 p.m., a fifty-minute lecture to 35 seniors and graduate students on in alternate years (a) the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and (b) Napoleon; and at 4 p.m. on Thursdays a graduate seminar of about 5 students whenever some one had a paper to read.

"Although Becker was not a specialist on Napoleon, he had mastered the best biographies and the outstanding monographs in the field. His lectures were elegant popularization at its best. Somewhere I still have my lecture notes, and in vocabulary, thought, and scrupulous definition they equal the lectures of George Herbert Mead and surpass those of every other teacher I listened to in an era when lecturing was still cultivated as an art.

"Becker also invited us to enlarge our knowledge by further reading. He suggested (he never required) that we purchase H.A.L. Fisher's eloquent short biography (1913) in the Home Library series and John Holland Rose's solid two-volume 1,000-page account (new edition, 1916).

"Becker also distributed an open-ended mimeographed synopsis divided into approximately eight units. In two or three sentences per unit, the synopsis gave a precis of the essence of the action, then noted the six to eight important points to follow up and investigate, and finally, listed the major monographs in English, French, and German, such as Louis Madelin's Fouche.

"Every evening after supper, seven days a week, I followed down the leads thus given. By the end of the semester, thanks to the lectures, the synopsis, and the reading I had as comprehensive a grasp of the field of Napoleonic scholarship as I was to gain again when working from 1982 to 1984 on [General Editor] Owen Connelly's Historical Dictionary of Napoleonic France, 1799-1815 [1985]."

Related: Back to Parker

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