Carl N. Degler, Scholarly Champion of the Oppressed in America, Dies at 93 |
Carl N. Degler, Scholarly Champion of the Oppressed in America, Dies at 93
The New York Times
2015-01-10
Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent
For four decades, as a Stanford University scholar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a commentator who envisioned a future that did not repeat the mistakes of the past, Carl N. Degler endeavored to remedy American myopia.
“Virtually from the beginning,” Professor Degler once lamented, “Americans have seen themselves outside history, as a people constituting a nation of the future.”
Delving into overlooked corners of history, he illuminated the role of women, the poor and ethnic minorities in the nation’s evolution and was embraced as a feminist and defender of affirmative action. He explored the 19th century American South; compared race relations in the United States and Brazil; and traced a revival of biological Darwinism in debates over human behavior.
He died on Dec. 27 at 93 in Palo Alto, Calif., his wife, Therese, confirmed.
As an emeritus professor of American history at Stanford, Professor Degler encouraged his students to pursue less traveled intellectual paths, as he had with his book “Neither Black Nor White,” which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1972. In it he compared the origins and legacy of slavery in the United States and Brazil…
Read the entire obituary here.
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