Freedom and Reform

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. . the personification of the American conscience' "To the academic community Henry had by the mid-1950's become the personification of the American conscience. To understand the things that made him what he has become one has to understand the American Enlightenment, whose notable men hardly conformed to any criterion of the average. One has to appreciate that devotion to the classics and that special cast of political thinking which Commager shares with the men of Jefferson's generation. But to at least an equal extent his mind and outlook have been shaped by the examples of the men of conscience of the nineteenth century, by Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, and James Russell Lowell. . . . Henry Commager kept the vigil for liberty." From "The View from the Top of Fayerweather" by Richárd B. Morris "It is impossible to understand Henry Steele Commager as a histórián unless one knows something of the man: his kinetic moods, his steady flow of thought, his effervescent ideas, his... Tovább

Fülszöveg

. . the personification of the American conscience' "To the academic community Henry had by the mid-1950's become the personification of the American conscience. To understand the things that made him what he has become one has to understand the American Enlightenment, whose notable men hardly conformed to any criterion of the average. One has to appreciate that devotion to the classics and that special cast of political thinking which Commager shares with the men of Jefferson's generation. But to at least an equal extent his mind and outlook have been shaped by the examples of the men of conscience of the nineteenth century, by Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, and James Russell Lowell. . . . Henry Commager kept the vigil for liberty." From "The View from the Top of Fayerweather" by Richárd B. Morris "It is impossible to understand Henry Steele Commager as a histórián unless one knows something of the man: his kinetic moods, his steady flow of thought, his effervescent ideas, his insights, and his strongly partisan feelings on many subjects historic and current. He is a modern Hazlitt. Like that great essayist, he has wide-ranging intellectual gifts, and like him he is essentially a romantic. . . . Like Hazlitt again he is equally interested in the past and the present, and knows weil how to make the one shed illumination upon the other. . . . It should be added that, despite his quickness of mind and romantic mutability of mood, he is a man of principle." From "Henry S. Commager as Histórián: An Appreciation" by Allan Nevins Vissza