James M. Banner Jr. | |
---|---|
Born | James Morrill Banner Jr. May 3, 1935 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Columbia University (PhD) |
Occupation | Historian |
Parent(s) | James M. Banner Dorothea Bauer Banner |
James Morrill Banner Jr. (born May 3, 1935) is an American historian whose scholarly specialties are the history of the United States, of the discipline of history, and of historical thought. He has served in a number of different academic and public capacities.
A New York City native born on May 3, 1935, [1] the son of James M. Banner, one of the nation's first real estate consultants, and Dorothea Bauer Banner, a homemaker and life-long civic and charitable volunteer, after attending Edgemont School (now the Seely Place School) in Scarsdale, New York, he graduated in 1953 from Deerfield Academy, and in 1957 from Yale University. After service in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps in the United States and France, he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1968 at Columbia University under Richard Hofstadter and Eric L. McKitrick. [2]
From 1966 to 1980, Banner taught at Princeton University, where he attained the rank of associate professor of history and chaired the Program in American Civilization and the Program in Continuing Education. He resigned his professorship in 1980 to found the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities. Subsequently, he served as director of publications and communications for Resources for the Future and the founding director of academic programs of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation. He is known for the creation of institutions, including the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the History News Service. He was also a co-founder of the National Humanities Alliance. In civic life, he was the founding chairman of New Jersey Common Cause and served on the National Governing Board of Common Cause from 1973 to 1979. The recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, he was a Fulbright Scholar/Professor at Charles University, Prague, and is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and a fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. In 2023, the American Historical Association created an annual James M. Banner, Jr., Lectureship on the State of the Discipline of History. [3]
Banner's writings have been diverse and influential. In To the Hartford Convention, which Gordon S. Wood called "truly outstanding" and Jack P Greene termed "an essential contribution to the early political history of the new nation", Banner tried to bring the Federalist Party back into consideration as fully committed to the principles of the American Revolution and the norms of republican government. [4] Diane Ravitch called The Elements of Teaching, which Banner wrote with Harold C. Cannon, "a true classic", and Andrew Delbanco termed its second edition "a wise and wonderfully concise reflection on a subject about which one might think everything worth saying had already been said". [5] Banner's Being a Historian was characterized as "a remarkable work of analysis, advice, and warning". [6] His 2022 work, "The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History," won praise as "a model of accessible. jargon-free prose [that] reveals an erudition across a range of western historiographical trends and debates;" [7] as "a wise and elegant book;" [8] and as a "carefully and judiciously written book", one of "learning, intelligence,and fairness...deserving a wide readership beyond the precincts of university discourse", and "a model of what now seems a somewhat old-fashioned but honorable liberal-humanist approach, respectful of the numerous components and complex dynamics of historical controversy". [9]
"The Problem of South Carolina," in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 60–93.
"Historians and the Impeachment Inquiry: A Brief History and Prospectus," Reviews in American History, vol. 4 (June 1976), pp. 139–149.
"France and the Origins of American Political Culture," Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn 1988), pp. 651–670.
“The Federalists—Still in Need of Reconsideration,” in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. by Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 246–253.
“The Capital and the State: Washington D.C. and the Nature of American Government,” in A Republic for the Ages, ed. by Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 64–86.
“Historian, Improvised,” in James M. Banner, Jr., and John R. Gillis, Becoming Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 259–288.
"The Election of 1801 and James A. Bayard's Disinterested Constitutionalism," Journal of the Early Republic," vol. 44 (Fall 2024), pp. 319–353.
The Federalist Party was a conservative and nationalist American political party and the first political party in the United States. It dominated the national government under Alexander Hamilton from 1789 to 1801. The party was defeated by the Democratic-Republican Party in 1800, and it became a minority party while keeping its stronghold in New England. It made a brief resurgence by opposing the War of 1812, then collapsed with its last presidential candidate in 1816. Remnants lasted for a few years afterwards.
The Federalist Papers is a collection of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the collective pseudonym "Publius" to promote the ratification of the Constitution of the United States. The collection was commonly known as The Federalist until the name The Federalist Papers emerged in the twentieth century.
The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America, commonly known as the Jay Treaty, and also as Jay's Treaty, was a 1794 treaty between the United States and Great Britain that averted war, resolved issues remaining since the Treaty of Paris of 1783, and facilitated ten years of peaceful trade between the United States and Britain in the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars, which began in 1792. The treaty was designed by Alexander Hamilton and supported by President George Washington. It angered France and bitterly divided Americans. It inflamed the new growth of two opposing parties in every state, the pro-Treaty Federalists and the anti-Treaty Jeffersonian Republicans.
Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus." Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" within the society as "bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship", criticizing the "hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history".
Mike Wallace is an American historian. He specializes in the history of New York City, and in the history and practice of "public history". In 1998 he co-authored Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which in 1999 won the Pulitzer Prize in History. In 2017, he published a successor volume, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. Wallace is a Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Stanley Maurice Elkins was an American historian, best known for his unique and controversial comparison of slavery in the United States to Nazi concentration camps, and for his collaborations with Eric McKitrick regarding the early American Republic. They together wrote The Age of Federalism, on the history of the founding fathers of America. He obtained his BA from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. Elkins first taught at the University of Chicago but spent most of his career as a professor of history at Smith College in Northampton, MA, where he raised his family and eventually retired.
The Yale Record is the campus humor magazine of Yale University. Founded in 1872, it is the oldest humor magazine in the United States.
The Anti-Administration party was an informal political faction in the United States led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson that opposed policies of then Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the first term of U.S. president George Washington. It was not an organized political party, but an unorganized faction. Most members had been Anti-Federalists in 1788, when they opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution. However, the situation was fluid, with members joining and leaving.
Charles McLean Andrews was an American historian, an authority on American colonial history. He wrote 102 major scholarly articles and books, as well as over 360 book reviews, newspaper articles, and short items. He is especially known as a leader of the "Imperial school" of historians who studied, and generally admired, the efficiency of the British Empire in the 18th century. Kross argues:
The First Party System was the political party system in the United States between roughly 1792 and 1824. It featured two national parties competing for control of the presidency, Congress, and the states: the Federalist Party, created largely by Alexander Hamilton, and the rival Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, usually called at the time the Republican Party.
David Morris Potter was an American historian specializing in the study of the coming of the American Civil War, especially the political factors. His best known book is The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, which was completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher and published posthumously in 1976.
The Oxford History of the United States is an ongoing multivolume narrative history of the United States published by Oxford University Press. Conceived in the 1950s and launched in 1961 under the co-editorship of historians Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward, the series has been edited by David M. Kennedy since 1999.
The presidency of John Adams, began on March 4, 1797, when John Adams was inaugurated as the second president of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1801. Adams, who had served as vice president under George Washington, took office as president after winning the 1796 presidential election. The only member of the Federalist Party to ever serve as president, his presidency ended after a single term following his defeat in the 1800 presidential election. He was succeeded by Thomas Jefferson of the opposition Democratic-Republican Party.
A bibliography of the history of education in the United States comprises tens of thousands of books, articles and dissertations. This is a highly selected guide to the most useful studies.
The Federalist Era in American history ran from 1788 to 1800, a time when the Federalist Party and its predecessors were dominant in American politics. During this period, Federalists generally controlled Congress and enjoyed the support of President George Washington and President John Adams. The era saw the creation of a new, stronger federal government under the United States Constitution, a deepening of support for nationalism, and diminished fears of tyranny by a central government. The era began with the ratification of the United States Constitution and ended with the Democratic-Republican Party's victory in the 1800 elections.
Eric Louis McKitrick was an American historian, best known for The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (1993) with Stanley Elkins, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1994.
The following is a list and discussion of scholarly resources relating to John Adams.
Traditionalist conservatism in the United States is a political, social philosophy and variant of conservatism. It has been influenced by thinkers such as John Adams and Russel Kirk.
Otis Livingston Graham Jr. (1935–2017) was an American historian, with a special interest in political history, immigration, and public history.
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 is a nonfiction book written by American historian Gordon S. Wood. Published as a clothbound hardcover in 2009 as part of the Oxford History of the United States series, the book narrates the history of the United States in the first twenty-six years following the ratification of the U. S. Constitution. The history Empire of Liberty tells privileges republicanism and political thought, characterizing the early United States as a time of growing egalitarianism unleashed by the American Revolution. The story involves both Federalists and Jeffersonians. Empire of Liberty tends to sympathize with Jeffersonians.