梅尔·柯蒂

梅尔·柯蒂（英语：Merle Eugene Curti，1897年9月15日—1996年3月9日）是一位美国进步主义历史学家，哥伦比亚大学和威斯康星大学教授，专攻社会历史学等，主要作品有获得1944年普利策历史奖的《美国思想的发展》（The Growth of American Thought）等。

Merle Eugene Curti (September 15, 1897 – March 9, 1996) was an American progressive historian who influenced peace studies, intellectual history and social history, including by using cliometrics (quantitative tools in historical research). At Columbia University and for decades at the University of Wisconsin, Curti directed 86 finished Ph.D. dissertations and had a wide range of correspondents. He was known for his commitment to democracy, as well as the Turnerian thesis that social and economic forces shape American life, thought and character.

Early life and education

Curti was born in Papillion, Nebraska, a suburb of Omaha, on September 15, 1897. His parents were John Eugene Curti, an immigrant from Switzerland, and Alice Hunt, a Yankee from Vermont. Curti attended high school in Omaha then obtained a bachelor's degree in 1920 from Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude. While attending Harvard, after a mandatory enlistment in the fall of 1918, Curti was involved in the Military Corps. He then spent a year studying in France where he met Margaret Wooster (1898–1963) who had a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and was a pioneer in research on child psychology. They married in 1925 and had two daughters. Curti received his Ph.D. in 1927 from Harvard as one of the last students of Frederick Jackson Turner.

Academic career

While at Smith College, Curti published his first book, The American Peace Crusade, 1815–1860 (1929). The book, based on his dissertation, was written after Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (who had replaced Turner at Harvard) rejected his first dissertation proposal which was essentially an early version of The Growth of American Thought.

Curti taught at Beloit College, Smith College, and Columbia University, then in 1942 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he taught for 25 years. He also taught in Japan, Australia, and India, and lectured throughout Europe.

Peace studies

Moving to Teachers College at Columbia in 1931, he published a book on William Jennings Bryan and world peace (Bryan and World Peace). It was followed by Peace or War: The American Struggle in 1936. With these works, Curti helped found peace and conflict studies as a field of study. He criticized pacifists for ignoring major social changes—especially the repudiation of old-fashioned competitive capitalism by the New Deal, and the need to repudiate imperial greed if peace were to be achieved. In 1964 he helped found the Conference on Peace Research in History, now called the Peace History Society. The Roots of American Loyalty (1946) was a history of patriotism.

Curti developed his global vision through travels; he taught in Japan, Australia and India for two years. He left the Episcopal faith of his boyhood for Unitarianism. Although never a Marxist, he voted for Socialist presidential candidates in the name of world peace.

Intellectual history

Curti turned his attention to intellectual history and helped to establish that field as a distinct academic discipline. His first foray in the field was The Social Ideals of American Educators, published in 1935. In 1944, Curti won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his masterwork, The Growth of American Thought. Its chapters show an encyclopedic knowledge of thinkers great and small from the colonial period to the present, together with his commitment to democracy as a process springing from the ideas of the people.

Curti adapted Turner's frontier thesis to intellectual history, arguing, "Because the American environment, physical and social, differed from that of Europe, Americans, confronted by different needs and problems, adapted the European intellectual heritage in their own way. And because American life came increasingly to differ from European life, American ideas, American agencies of intellectual life, and the use made of knowledge likewise came to differ in America from their European counterparts." (p vi)