Books by Oscar Handlin

No detailed description available for "Harvard Guide to American History".

No detailed description available for "The Newcomers".

No detailed description available for "The American People in the Twentieth Century".

Using the ability of the individual to take action as a working measure of the extent of liberty at any time, Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin identify and describe numerous factors that have had an important effect on American freedom since colonial days. In defining the broad dimensions of the conception, they investigate, among other subjects, the significance of the idea that the state derived power from the consent of the governed, the early concept of the Commonwealth, the later one of police powers, the roles played by governmental institutions, churches, secret lodges, voluntary associations of all kinds, immigration, the professions, continuing social and physical mobility, and the growth of wealth.

This book examines the troubled era that transformed the United States after 1920, emphasizing the conditions of life of ordinary men and women and the structures of their society, not the theories of either liberty or equality elaborated by thoughtful scholars.

Like scholars in other fields, historians have long occupied themselves in self-justification

Offers a methodological primer on how historians gather evidence, presume reliability of witnesses, and develop forms of verification in the conduct of analysis and research. It is an introduction to the study of history and an examination of specific instances in which ideology has distorted the study of American history.

A Pulitzer Prize winner and mentor for more than a generation of American historians, Handlin instructs his readers in the fundamentals of his field. He tells us how to deal with evidence, how to discern patterns amid flux, how to situate ourselves in history, and how to recognize where fact shades subtly into opinion.

Commonwealth, when first published in 1947, was a pioneer effort to investigate the historical role of government in the American economy. The present edition has been revised by the authors to take into account the research of the past two decades.

As fresh in 1991 as when it first published a half-century ago, Boston's Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects.

A professional critique of the tendency in academic scholarship to prove worth, which becomes relevance and which in turn is interpreted as a search not for truth but political correctness. Handlin explores the social history of historians and how and why a discipline surrenders the search for truth in favour of assertions of ideological purity.