William Romeyn Everdell is an American teacher and author. [1] He is Dean of Humanities, Emeritus, at Saint Ann's School. [2] [3] [4]
Born in 1941, he graduated from St. Paul's School and from Princeton University. [5] A Woodrow Wilson Scholar and Fulbright Scholar, he holds a master's degree in history from Harvard University and a Ph.D from New York University. [6] Everdell's dissertation, later published in book form, is notable for being the first work to place Jean-Jacques Rousseau within the Counter-Enlightenment, according to Graeme Garrard. [7]
In 1970, he began teaching at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where he taught world history until retiring in 2016. [8] [6] [9] [10] He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, [11] and is the author of a number of books and articles on intellectual history and the history of ideas. One book, The End of Kings (1983, 2000) recaptures the historical definition of "republic" as a state not ruled by one person. [12] [13] Another, The First Moderns (1997) redefines "Modernism" as the abandonment of the continuous in favor of the discrete in the arts and sciences that began in the West in 1872–1913. [14] [15] The New York Times included The First Moderns on its list of "notable books of the year" for 1997. [16] In 2021 Springer published his The Evangelical Counter-Enlightenment, which uses biographical profiles to argue that Wahhabi Islam, Hasidic Judaism, and "Evangelical" Protestant Christianity, which arose nearly simultaneously in the middle of the 18th century CE, are best understood as aspects of what Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment.
He has also written on the teaching of history, edited the historical section of the website of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn [17] and served on the Test Development Committee for the first Advanced Placement World History Exams. [18] A member of the American Historical Association, he has also served as the president of the affiliated Organization of History Teachers, and of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. [5]
His wife, Barbara, was a longtime administrator at Saint Ann's, and together they have two sons, Josh and Chris. [2]
The Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge in New York City, spanning the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Opened on May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the first fixed crossing of the East River. It was also the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time of its opening, with a main span of 1,595.5 feet (486.3 m) and a deck 127 ft (38.7 m) above mean high water. The span was originally called the New York and Brooklyn Bridge or the East River Bridge but was officially renamed the Brooklyn Bridge in 1915.
Coney Island is a neighborhood and entertainment area in the southwestern section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is bounded by Brighton Beach to its east, Lower New York Bay to the south and west, and Gravesend to the north and includes the subsection of Sea Gate on its west. More broadly, the Coney Island peninsula consists of Coney Island proper, Brighton Beach, and Manhattan Beach. This was formerly the westernmost of the Outer Barrier islands on the southern shore of Long Island, but in the early 20th century it became connected to the rest of Long Island by land fill.
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the Age of Reason of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Commentators variously consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with World War II in 1945, or as late as the period falling between the 1980s and 1990s; the following era is often referred to as "postmodernity". The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe, without assigning it to either the modern or postmodern era.
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is a suspension bridge connecting the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn. It spans the Narrows, a body of water linking the relatively enclosed New York Harbor with Lower New York Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It is the only fixed crossing of the Narrows. The double-deck bridge carries 13 lanes of Interstate 278: seven on the upper level and six on the lower level. The span is named for Giovanni da Verrazzano, who in 1524 was the first European explorer to enter New York Harbor and the Hudson River.
The Manhattan Bridge is a suspension bridge that crosses the East River in New York City, connecting Lower Manhattan at Canal Street with Downtown Brooklyn at the Flatbush Avenue Extension. Designed by Leon Moisseiff and built by the Phoenix Bridge Company, the bridge has a total length of 6,855 ft (2,089 m). It is one of four toll-free vehicular bridges connecting Manhattan Island to Long Island; the nearby Brooklyn Bridge is just slightly farther west, while the Queensboro and Williamsburg bridges are to the north.
The Counter-Enlightenment refers to a loose collection of intellectual stances that arose during the European Enlightenment in opposition to its mainstream attitudes and ideals. The Counter-Enlightenment is generally seen to have continued from the 18th century into the early 19th century, especially with the rise of Romanticism. Its thinkers did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief in progress, the rationality of all humans, liberal democracy, and the increasing secularisation of European society.
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the museum's Beaux-Arts building was designed by McKim, Mead & White.
Saint Ann's School is a private school in Brooklyn, New York City. The school is a non-sectarian, co-educational pre-K–12 day school with programs in the arts, humanities, and sciences. The students number 1,012 from preschool through 12th grade, as well as 324 faculty, administration, and staff members.
Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Upsala College (UC) was a private college affiliated with the Swedish-American Augustana Synod and located in East Orange in Essex County, New Jersey in the United States, with an additional campus in Wantage Township in Sussex County. Upsala was founded in 1893 in Brooklyn, New York City, and moved to Kenilworth, and finally to East Orange in 1924. Despite a turnaround strategy that involved recruiting minority and international students, declining enrollment and financial difficulties forced the school to close in 1995.
The Williamsburgh Savings Bank was a financial institution in Brooklyn, New York, from 1851 to 1986. The bank was incorporated in 1851 under legislation passed by the New York State Assembly. The bank continued to operate until a series of mergers brought the bank into the HSBC group late in the 20th century.
Peter Balakian is an American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
Free Press was an American independent book publisher that later became an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It was one of the best-known publishers specializing in serious nonfiction, including path-breaking sociology books of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. After a period under new ownership in the 1980s of publishing neoconservative books, it was purchased by Simon & Schuster in 1994. By 2012, the imprint ceased to exist as a distinct entity; however, some books were still being published using the Free Press imprint.
Brooklyn Bridge Park is an 85-acre (34 ha) park on the Brooklyn side of the East River in New York City. Designed by landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the park is located on a 1.3-mile (2.1 km) plot of land from Atlantic Avenue in the south, under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and past the Brooklyn Bridge, to Jay Street north of the Manhattan Bridge. From north to south, the park includes the preexisting Empire–Fulton Ferry and Main Street Parks; the historic Fulton Ferry Landing; and Piers 1–6, which contain various playgrounds and residential developments. The park also includes Empire Stores and the Tobacco Warehouse, two 19th-century structures, and is a part of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, a series of parks and bike paths around Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn Rail is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The Rail is based in Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, critics, and curators, and reviews of art, music, dance, film, books, and theater.
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism is a book by Abbé Augustin Barruel, a French Jesuit priest. It was written and published in French in 1797–98, and translated into English in 1799.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a shipyard and industrial complex in northwest Brooklyn in New York City, New York, U.S. The Navy Yard is located on the East River in Wallabout Bay, a semicircular bend of the river across from Corlears Hook in Manhattan. It is bounded by Navy Street to the west, Flushing Avenue to the south, Kent Avenue to the east, and the East River on the north. The site, which covers 225.15 acres (91.11 ha), is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought is a book on Modernism by the historian William Everdell, published in 1997 by the University of Chicago Press. A New York Times Notable Book of 1997, and included by the New York Public Library on its list of "25 Books to Remember from 1997", The First Moderns suggests that "the heart of Modernism is the postulate of ontological discontinuity".
Graeme Garrard is a Canadian political theorist and writer. He is Professor of Politics at Cardiff University in the UK.
Gertrude Divine Webster was an American philanthropist known for co-founding the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, and establishing Yester House, her summer estate which is on the National Register of Historic Places and houses the Southern Vermont Arts Center. During her marriage to William McClellan Ritter she was known as Gertrude Divine Ritter. She subsequently married Hugh Webster, and was known as Gertrude Divine Webster until her death on March 31, 1947.