Arthur L. Herman
American historian
Arthur L. Herman (born 1956) is an American popular historian . He is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute .[1]
Biography
Herman's father Arthur L. Herman, a scholar of Sanskrit , was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point .
Herman received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University . He spent a semester abroad at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland .[1] His 1984 dissertation research dealt with the political thought of early-17th-century French Huguenots.[2]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Herman taught at Sewanee: The University of the South , George Mason University , Georgetown and The Catholic University of America . He was the founder and coordinator of the Western Heritage Program in the Smithsonian's Campus on the Mall lecture series.[3] [4]
His 2001 book on the Scottish Enlightenment , How the Scots Invented the Modern World , was a New York Times bestseller.
In 2008, he added to his body of work Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age , a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.[5]
In 1987, Herman married Beth Marla Warshofsky.[6] He lives in Washington, D.C. [7]
Views
Herman generally employs the Great Man perspective in his work, which is 19th-century historical methodology attributing human events and their outcomes to the singular efforts of great men that has been refined and qualified by such modern thinkers as Sidney Hook .
He did not join the ranks of the so-called declinists after examining the works of Friedrich Nietzsche , Michel Foucault , Henry Adams , Brooks Adams , Oswald Spengler , and Arnold Toynbee , who expressed pessimism about the fate of the West, and remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the Western civilization.[8] [9]
He argues that after passing through the critical era of rapid geopolitical changes in the 20th century driven by an "ideological fervor to transform humanity and create a more perfect world order", the world finally entered in the 21st century into an era of relative stability "defined by the balance-of-power geopolitics."[10]
Herman advocates embracing the U.S. history in its entirety, including the American Civil War , rather than sanitizing it after the fact: "America is a country where the process of conflict and reconciliation, combined with the passage of time, brings out and embeds the qualities that make the United States one people and one community."[11]
Works
External videos Presentation by Herman on The Idea of Decline in Western History , March 18, 1997 , C-SPAN Booknotes interview with Herman on Joseph McCarthy , February 6, 2000 , C-SPAN Presentation by Herman on How the Scots Invented the Modern World , January 10, 2002 , C-SPAN Presentation by Herman on To Rule the Waves , November 10, 2004 , C-SPAN Presentation by Herman on Gandhi and Churchill , May 15, 2008 , C-SPAN Presentation by Herman on Freedom's Forge , May 14, 2012 , C-SPAN Q&A interview with Herman on Douglas MacArthur , June 26, 2016 , C-SPAN
The Idea Of Decline In Western History , Free Press, 1997 ISBN 978-0684827919 .
Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator , Free Press, 1999 ISBN 978-0684836256 .
How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It , Three Rivers Press 2002 ISBN 978-0609809990 .
To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World , HarperCollins, 2004 ISBN 978-0060534240 .
Gandhi and Churchill:The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age , Bantam, 2008 ISBN 978-0553804638 .
Freedom's Forge: How American Business produced victory in World War II , 2012 ISBN 978-1400069644
Herman, Arthur (2014). The Cave and the Light : Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization . ISBN 978-0553385663 .
Herman, Arthur L. (2016). Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior . Presidio Press. ISBN 978-0812985108 .
Herman, Arthur (2017). 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder . ISBN 978-0062570888 .
The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World , Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021 ISBN 978-1328595904
References
^ a b Hudson Institute Experts: Arthur Herman, Senior Fellow
^ Arthur L. Herman. The Saumur assembly 1611: Huguenot political belief and action in the age of Marie de Medici [permanent dead link ] . Johns Hopkins University , Dissertation by Arthur L. Herman, 1984.
^ The cave and the light: Plato vs. Aristotle and the struggle for the soul of Western civilization. Book Forum: Charles Murray, Alex J. Pollock, Arthur Herman , American Enterprise Institute , November 12, 2013.
^ Random House Author Spotlight: Arthur Herman . Retrieved 2008-07-07
^ 2009 Pulitzer Prizes retrieved 2016-08-29
^ Style: Beth Marla Warshofsky Weds Arthur L. Herman , The New York Times , August 10, 1987.
^ "Arthur Herman, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt" . Archived from the original on 2022-03-31. Retrieved 2022-03-19 .
^ Fareed Zakaria. An Optimist's Lament , The New York Times , March 30, 1997.
^ Michael De Sapio. Standing Athwart History: Can We Stop the Decline of the West? , The Imaginative Conservative , October 4, 2016.
^ Arthur Herman. The New Era of Global Stability: The grand ideological conflicts that began in 1917 are giving way to old-fashioned geopolitics , The Wall Street Journal , Dec. 19, 2017.
^ Arthur L. Herman. Confederate Statues Honor Timeless Virtues — Let Them Stay , National Review , August 19, 2017.
External links
International National Academics Other