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Biography of Carl Lotus BeckerName: Carl Lotus BeckerBirth Date: September 7, 1873 Death Date: April 10, 1945 Place of Birth: Waterloo, Iowa, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: historian Carl Lotus Becker American historian Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945) was a proponent of the doctrine of historical relativism. He is best known for his book "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers."Carl Becker was born on a farm near Waterloo, lowa, on Sept. 7, 1873. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1896, where he had studied history with Frederick Jackson Turner, and stayed on for 2 years of graduate work, followed by a year at Columbia University with H. L. Osgood and J. H. Robinson. He took his doctorate under Turner in 1907; in his thesis, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (1909), he contended that the American Revolution was fundamentally a conflict over "who should rule at home."In 1901 he married Maude Hepworth Ranney, a widow with a young daughter, and they had one son. Becker taught at Pennsylvania State College, Dartmouth, and Minnesota, and spent 14 years at the University …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…of their own apart from any particular social system or type of civilization." In the war years he revised his pragmatic relativism so as to give some positive answer to the question, "What Is Still Living in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?" (published in 1943).Becker died in Ithaca, N.Y., on April 10, 1945. Further Reading A rounded portrait of Becker as man, teacher, philosopher, and historian is provided by Charlotte Watkins Smith, Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion (1956). Raymond O. Rockwood, ed., Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited (1958), brings together criticisms and recollections by a number of historians, including distinguished former students who knew Becker well. Becker's ideas and his significance in the history of American thought are treated in detail in Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (1958), and Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (1961). |