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Roger Lane (born January 17, 1934) is an American historian and professor emeritus at Haverford College. [1]
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Roger Lane (born January 17, 1934) is an American historian and professor emeritus at Haverford College. [1]
Lane was born on January 17, 1934, to Eileen O'Connor and Alfred Baker Lewis, who gave him an invented surname before marrying in 1940. Raised in New England, he graduated from Yale (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1955. At Columbia during 1955-6 he took a graduate history seminar with Richard Hofstader, then spent a year teaching and coaching athletics at Brunswick School in Connecticut. From there he earned a PhD at Harvard, as a student of the pioneering social historian Oscar Handlin, before accepting a position at Haverford in 1963.
His study of Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885 ( Harvard University Press, 1967), was the first on the origins of urban police in America. A 1968 article in the Journal of Social History, "Urbanization and Criminal Violence in the 19th Century", challenged the then-conventional wisdom that crime naturally increases as cities grow. This earned an appointment to The President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which reprinted it. Its depiction of the regimentation of life under the Industrial Revolution won the attention of Theodore Kaczynski, the infamous "Unabomber", who quoted it extensively in his 1995 manifesto, giving Lane a small role in his identification and capture. [2]
Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in 19th Century Philadelphia, (Harvard University Press, 1979), showed how the behavioral demands of school, office, and factory decreased the external manifestations of aggression, as murder, while increasing the internal, as suicide. Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900, (Harvard University Press, 1986) focused on how exclusion from factory and white collar jobs pushed many African Americans into dangerous criminal entrepreneurship; it won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, from the Trustees of Columbia University, as one of that year's best books in American History. William Dorsey'sPhiladelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America, (Oxford University Press, 1991) showed how this effect blighted a promising post-Civil War Golden Age in what was then the biggest and best-educated African American community in the North. Murder in America: A History (Ohio State University Press, 1997), traced its subject from medieval England into the late 20th century.
Lane has won the Lindback Award and several other teaching awards; in 1987 the Philadelphia Inquirer named him one of the "Ten Top Profs" in the metropolitan area. A small college, Haverford allowed him to participate in intramural athletics and theater, and enabled him to explore courses beyond American History in the humanities, touching e.g. on The Bible, Shakespeare, and Freud. The college granted him an honorary degree after his retirement in 1999.
He has appeared in many television documentaries, on ethnic history, crime, policing, guns, and murder.
Lane's two younger brothers, John Michael Lane and Stephen Lewis, have died. Marriage to Patricia Ann Hindle in 1955 produced two children, Margaret Mary and James Michael Lane, before their divorce in 1971. He married Marjorie Gail Merklin in 1974, and they together have a daughter, Joanna Lewis Lane.
Living in Haverford, Pennsylvania, he and Marjorie have been active in civic life, especially involving the local African American community. Other interests include reading, politics, sports, and music, lecturing on social history, and tutoring both children and adults.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist.
Leo Max Frank was an American factory superintendent and lynching victim. He was convicted in 1913 of the murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta, Georgia. Frank's trial, conviction, and unsuccessful appeals attracted national attention. His kidnapping from prison and lynching became the focus of social, regional, political, and racial concerns, particularly regarding antisemitism. Modern researchers generally agree that Frank was wrongly convicted.
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.
Robert Choate Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France.
Andrew Lindsay Lewis Jr., generally known as Drew Lewis, was an American businessman and politician from the state of Pennsylvania. He was United States Secretary of Transportation in the first portion of the administration of U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan, and is best known for presiding over the firing of the striking U.S. air traffic controllers in 1981.
Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is a discredited 2000 book by historian Michael A. Bellesiles about American gun culture, an expansion of a 1996 article he published in the Journal of American History. Bellesiles, then a professor at Emory University, used fabricated research to argue that during the early period of US history, guns were uncommon during peacetime and that a culture of gun ownership did not arise until the mid-nineteenth century.
Richard Lyman Bushman is an American historian and Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, having previously taught at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware. Bushman is the author of Joseph Smith:Rough Stone Rolling, a biography of Joseph Smith, progenitor of the Latter Day Saint movement. Bushman also was an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and now serves on the national advisory board. Bushman has been called "one of the most important scholars of American religious history" of the late-20th century. In 2012, a $3-million donation to the University of Virginia established the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies in his honor.
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Charles Coleman Sellers was an American historian, biographer, and librarian who won the Bancroft Prize in 1970 for his biography of American painter Charles Willson Peale. Sellers was a long-time librarian at Dickinson College and also held positions at Wesleyan University and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.
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William Henry Dorsey (1837-1923) was a bibliophile, artist, scrapbooker, numismatist, social historian, and collector of Black history and art. He was most noted for the 388 scrapbooks he compiled of newspaper and magazine clippings chronicling Black life in his hometown of Philadelphia and across the country during the 19th century.
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Christopher James Perry, Sr. (1854–1921) was an American businessman, politician, civil rights activist, newspaper founder, newspaper editor, and journalist. He was the founder of The Tribune, the longest running African-American newspaper.
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