Handlin, Oscar

Related Category: Historians, U.S.: Biographies

1915–, American historian, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1940 and has taught there since 1939. Most of his work is in U.S. social and economic history, particularly in the influence of immigration on American culture. With his wife, Mary F. Handlin, he wrote Commonwealth (1947), a study of the economy and of the role of government in Massachusetts during the period 1774–1861. He won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize in history for The Uprooted (1951, 2d enl. ed. 1973), a history of the immigration movements to America after 1820. Among his other works are Boston's Immigrants, 1790–1865 (1941, rev. and enl. ed. 1959); Adventure in Freedom; 300 Years of Jewish Life in America (1954); Race and Nationality in American Life (1957); The Newcomers—Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (1959); and The Dimensions of Liberty (1961).