Daniel Gross, American economic journalist, Slate columnist, and blogger at www.danielgross.net, recalls historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died recently. Schlesinger's career reminds Gross why he dropped out of his Harvard University American history PhD a decade or so ago:
“There was another reason I left. Before entering graduate school, I had worked at the New Republic. And I had (naively) assumed that graduate school would be something like a continuation of my year at TNR, that the history department would be stocked with Schlesingers and Schlesingers in the making--historians who were interested in politics past and present, public intellectuals just as willing to talk about the (first)Bush administration as the first Cleveland administration, people interested in writing for and speaking to a broad, high-to-middlebrow audience.
"Well, there were some of those types there. But not that many. And the sort of history that Schlesinger did so brilliantly--synthesizing, broad, political, present-minded--was out of fashion.”
