His most characteristic books were his 1950 monograph The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Character Thought since the 1880s and his 1977 study The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. (This series was a successor to the American Nation series planned and edited at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart.)Ĭommager's first solo book was his 1936 biography, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, a life of the Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, reformer, and abolitionist Theodore Parker it was reissued in 1960, along with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best of Parker's voluminous writings. Morris, he also co-edited the New American Nation Series, a multi-volume collaborative history of the United States under whose aegis appeared many significant and prize-winning works of historical scholarship. Morris), treat the Civil War and the American Revolution, respectively, as seen by participants.
His two documentary histories, The Blue and the Gray and The Spirit of Seventy-Six (the latter co edited with his longtime friend and Columbia colleague Richard B. His anthology, Documents of American History (1938), reaching its tenth edition (coedited with his former student Milton Cantor) in 1988, half a century after its first appearance, remains a standard reference work. Leuchtenburg, 1980 abridged editions in 19 under the title Concise History of the American Republic). He was coauthor, with Samuel Eliot Morison, of the widely-used history text The Growth of the American Republic (1930 1937 1942 1950, 1962 1969 7th ed., with William E. McLaughlin, Commager shifted his research and teaching interests to American history. Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian Andrew C. dissertation on the Danish philosopher and reformer Johann Friedrich Struensee, a major reformer during the Enlightenment. He retired in 1992 from the John Woodruff Simpson Lectureship.Ĭommager originally studied Danish history, and wrote his Ph.D. He taught at New York University from 1930 to 1936, Columbia University (from 1936 to 1956), and Amherst College in Massachusetts (from 1956 to 1992).
Commager, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked his way through the University of Chicago, having earned the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.
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