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Nanette Shaw
The Graduate Center of The City University of New York has announced the establishment of the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Chair in American History. The endowed chair was made possible by friends and admirers of Professor Schlesinger to honor his contributions to a broad spectrum of political, diplomatic, and intellectual history. A distinguished American historian whose work is in one or more of those arenas will be selected to fill the chair. Contributors to the endowment included Ms. Susan Halpern and the Uris Brothers Foundation, the Arthur Ross Foundation, the Honorable Jean Kennedy Smith (in memory of Stephen Smith), Senator Edward Kennedy and Ms. Caroline Schlossberg Kennedy, Mr. Dan Rose and Mrs. Joanna Rose, Mrs. Brooke Astor, Mr. Benno C. Schmidt, Jr., Mr. Martin E. Segal, and Mrs. Maria Gaetana Matisse. One of the country's most renowned scholars, Professor Schlesinger was Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at The Graduate Center from 1966 to 1994, and he remains active in an emeritus capacity. He and other distinguished historians have helped the CUNY Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in History attain its current status as one of the top 20 in the country. "This chair is a way of permanently recognizing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s preeminent roles as a scholar of American History, a participant in American history, and a faculty member of The Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in History," said Graduate Center President Frances Degen Horowitz. Professor Schlesinger recently published the first volume of his memoirs, titled A Life in the Twentieth Century. He entered Harvard University at age sixteen and graduated summa cum laude in 1938 and from Harvard's prestigious Society of Fellows in 1943. During World War II he served in the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services. In 1946, at the age of twenty-eight, he was appointed as Associate Professor of History at Harvard. and won his first Pulitzer Prize for the The Age of Jackson. In the late 1950s, his multivolume The Age of Roosevelt was published to critical acclaim. From 1960 to 1963, he served as a special assistant to President Kennedy and he won a second Pultizer Prize and the National Book Award in 1966 for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965). Professor Schlesinger joined the CUNY Graduate Center faculty in 1966 as Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities and added Emeritus to the title when he retired in 1994. Among his other books are The Imperial Presidency (1973); Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), for which he won a National Book Award; The Cycles of American History (1986); and The Disuniting of America (1991). In 1980, he founded the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award with proceeds from his best-selling biography. In 1998, he returned to the White House to receive a National Humanities Medal from President Clinton. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York, the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, The Graduate Center draws its faculty of more than 1,600 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 32 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 28 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. The Seymour B. Durst Old York Library and Reading Room Seymour Durst began his collection in 1962 after visiting Paris, where he found a German edition of an elaborate photographic book about New York City in a bookstore window. Eventually, even the refrigerator in Durst’s townhouse was filled with books (he ate out). He had, in fact, moved twice to accommodate the ever-growing library. Durst assembled his library in a manner that would arouse both the envy and despair of the average librarian. It was organized by what he termed the "Durst Quintessimal System" and filled all but four of the 20 rooms in the house. Each room had a different theme and if a book fell into three different categories he would simply buy three copies, one for each related room. Some of the other rooms/categories include the Postcard & Guide Room, a kitchen closet reserved for NY Historical Society publications, the Art & Theatre Room, the Architecture Closet, the Commerce and Finance Room, the Biography Room, etc. The Reading Room at The Graduate Center reflects those categories of organization, and the furnishings include a rug, table, breakfront, and couches from Durst’s study, along with book cabinets built especially for the room. For research purposes, a database has been created that will be accessible online and will make it convenient to use the material. It may be accessed by going to the Old York Foundations website at www.oldyorklibrary.org. The thousands of items encompass such things as an invitation to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, which is referred to as "the East River Bridge;" bound editions of Harper’s Weekly from 1850 to 1915; Durst’s own favorite book, E.B. White’s Here is New York; The Bowery on Seventy-Five Cents a Day; an autographed copy of Theodore Dreiser’s My City; and numbered editions of Al Hirschfeld’s 1932 Manhattan Oases (199/200), featuring drawings of city speakeasy bartenders, and the artist’s 1941 depictions of Harlem (445/1000). Among the more rare books, though not directly related to New York City, is an original edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with Paine’s own edits hand-written between the lines. (See press release for more examples.) # # # |