Commager, Henry Steele (1902-1998)

US historian. His Documents of American History (1934) marked the beginning of the editing and publishing of anthologies of source materials of the American historical record, for which Commager was a pioneer. A strong critic of 1950s anticommunist conformity, he continued to argue for free speech and enquiry during the Vietnam era.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was educated at the University of Chicago (PhD 1928) and the Universities of Copenhagen, Cambridge, and Oxford. He taught at New York University (1926-38), Columbia University (1939-56), and Amherst College (1956). His best-known book, The Growth of the American Republic (1931), coauthored with Samuel Eliot Morison, remains a standard undergraduate text. He also wrote for more popular media and often spoke out on contemporary issues. He was also noted for a lucid style that combined a keen critical viewpoint with an absence of cant and jargon.

He wrote in Civil Liberties under Attack (1951), ‘The great danger that threatens us is neither heterodox nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought’. He later argued that the idealism of the 1960s was a renaissance, not a repudiation, of American Revolutionary ideals.