DOCSLIB.ORG

Perceptions of Women's Political Activity in The

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Perceptions of Women's Political Activity in The “Et nous aussi nous sommes Citoyennes”: Perceptions of Women’s Political Activity in the French Revolution, 1789-1793. by Chandler Freeman-Orr Bachelor of Arts, Honours, Queen’s University, 2016 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of History ã Chandler Freeman-Orr, 2018 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author ii Supervisory Committee “Et nous aussi nous sommes Citoyennes”: Perceptions of Women’s Political Activity in the French Revolution, 1789-1793 by Chandler Freeman-Orr Bachelor of Arts, Honours, Queen’s University, 2016 Supervisory Committee Dr. Jill Walshaw, Department of History Supervisor Dr. Rob Alexander, Department of History Departmental Member iii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Jill Walshaw, Department of History Supervisor Dr. Rob Alexander, Department of History Departmental Member This thesis explores the multiple ways women’s capacity for political action was perceived, both by themselves as well as by others, in the early years of the French Revolution. By beginning with women’s journey to Versailles in the October Days of 1789 and concluding with the National Convention’s closure of all women’s political clubs in October 1793, this thesis will suggest that women perceived themselves politically and as viable revolutionary participants, but that these identifications were grounded in and shaped by hegemonic eighteenth-century gender norms, and often demonstrated continuity with their pre-revolutionary identities. In many cases, both men’s and women’s perceptions of women’s appropriate political roles were influenced by idealized standards and gender norms, as exemplified by the fictitious character, Sophie, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 treatise, Emile, or On Education. The ways women rationalized their political inclusion and situated themselves within the developing revolution demonstrate a sense of compromise with the same norms and ideals which were increasingly used to justify their complete exclusion from political life. Through stressing revolutionary ideals such as equality and unity and by underscoring the importance of their complementary revolutionary contributions, women presented a view of themselves as necessary and viable participants in revolutionary politics in a way that, by late October 1793, increasingly seemed to threaten established societal views on the appropriate boundaries of female political life. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee .................................................................................................................. ii Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables .................................................................................................................................. v Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ vi Introduction & Literature Review ................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Women and the Politics of the Everyday ............................................................... 31 The Politics of Subsistence ....................................................................................................... 33 Traditional Roles ....................................................................................................................... 38 Instigating the March ................................................................................................................ 43 Perceptions of Authority, Efficacy & Legitimacy .................................................................... 49 Chapter Two: Women and the Nation .......................................................................................... 59 Societal Ideals ........................................................................................................................... 62 Citizenship ................................................................................................................................ 69 Women’s Perceptions of Citizenship ........................................................................................ 77 Chapter Three: Women and Political Institutions ......................................................................... 86 Lobby Groups, Petitions & Demonstrations of Support ........................................................... 90 Political Clubs & Societies ..................................................................................................... 101 Resistance & Restriction: October 30th, 1793 ........................................................................ 114 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 119 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 124 v List of Tables Table One: Trends in Châtelet Commission Testimonies ............................................................ 48 vi Acknowledgements While it seems somewhat redundant to say, writing this thesis has been a difficult and stressful endeavour, and this work would not have been possible without the support and contributions of numerous people who provided their help in various forms. While I cannot possibly thank everyone within the narrow confines of a page, there are a few people in particular who deserve recognition for their aid. First, thank you to my family for providing their support in every possible way. Thank you to my siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and to every family member who endlessly prodded me to explain my thesis topic to them until they at least somewhat understood what I was spending all this time writing about. In particular, thank you to my parents, Tammy, Peter, John, and Lynnette, for their endless confidence in my ability to finish what I started and to do it well. I could not have done this without your encouragement. Second, thank you to all the friends who kept me sane at every stage of this journey. Thank you for watching Friends and Harry Potter on repeat, for always being game to grab coffee, for trading bad jokes and laughing at my often-atrocious puns, and for always being there. I could not have done this without any of you. Finally, thank you to my committee, but especially to my supervisor, Dr. Jill Walshaw at the University of Victoria, for reading an endless number of horrific first drafts, and for helping me shape them into the project contained in these pages. There is truly no way I could have done this without your guidance, and the words ‘thank you’ do not do justice to the extent of your contributions. Introduction & Literature Review In a 16 Messidor Year II (July 1794) statement, written upon her arrest in a Luxembourg prison, founding member of the Société des républicaines révolutionnaires Anne Pauline Léon expresses her profound commitment to the French Revolution. In her statement, Léon details multiple examples of her political engagement, including inciting crowds at the Bastille in July 1789, throwing a bust of Lafayette out of an apartment window, and witnessing the massacre at the Champs de Mars in July 1791.1 She describes how she welcomed the political establishment of the Montagnards in 1793, and “…expressed, on behalf of the citoyennes of my Section, their joy and satisfaction over the completion of the constitution.” 2 Throughout her statement, Léon not only makes evident her own extensive stake in the political outcome of the revolution, but she also indicates multiple examples of the ways other women actively participated in the revolution and engaged with its political aspects, including their encouragement of crowds at riots, women’s signatures on patriotic petitions, and their participation in revolutionary societies.3 Léon describes herself and the women of her section as citoyennes, establishing a space for women within revolutionary politics, and identifying herself 1 Anne Pauline Léon, “Anne Pauline Léon, Femme Leclerc, Reconciles Her Political Behavior with Radical Revolutionary Principles and Policies,” in Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795, ed. Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979): 158-160. 2 Léon, “Anne Pauline Léon… Reconciles her Political Behavior with Radical Revolutionary Principles and Policies,” 159-60. 3 Léon describes her own participation throughout the revolution, from the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 until her arrest on 14 Germinal Year II (April 1794) throughout her statement. Although Léon’s statement details her own participation, she frequently refers to other women who were also present at these junctures, including her mother, friends, and fellow members of the Société des républicaines révolutionnaires. Léon’s own participation is extensive, but also gestures to multiple different points of entry for the participation of women in the revolution more broadly. 2
Load more

Recommended publications
  • John R. Mcneill University Professor Georgetown University President of the American Historical Association, 2019 Presidential Address
    2020-President_Address.indd All Pages 14/10/19 7:31 PM John R. McNeill University Professor Georgetown University President of the American Historical Association, 2019 Presidential Address New York Hilton Trianon Ballroom New York, New York Saturday, January 4, 2020 5:30 PM John R. McNeill By George Vrtis, Carleton College In fall 1998, John McNeill addressed the Georgetown University community to help launch the university’s new capital campaign. Sharing the stage with Georgetown’s president and other dignitaries, McNeill focused his comments on the two “great things” he saw going on at Georgetown and why each merited further support. One of those focal points was teaching and the need to constantly find creative new ways to inspire, share knowledge, and build intellectual community among faculty and students. The other one centered on scholarship. Here McNeill suggested that scholars needed to move beyond the traditional confines of academic disciplines laid down in the 19th century, and engage in more innovative, imaginative, and interdisciplinary research. Our intellectual paths have been very fruitful for a long time now, McNeill observed, but diminishing returns have set in, information and methodologies have exploded, and new roads beckon. To help make his point, McNeill likened contemporary scholars to a drunk person searching for his lost keys under a lamppost, “not because he lost them there but because that is where the light is.” The drunk-swirling-around-the-lamppost metaphor was classic McNeill. Throughout his academic life, McNeill has always conveyed his ideas in clear, accessible, often memorable, and occasionally humorous language. And he has always ventured into the darkness, searchlight in hand, helping us to see and understand the world and ourselves ever more clearly with each passing year.
    [Show full text]
  • How Modern Is the French Revolution?
    Review Essay Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution? REBECCA L. SPANG It is a truth, widely acknowledged, that the study of history has changed dramatically 1 since the end of World War II. Cliometrics has come and gone; the new social history has become old hat; narrative has been revived. Structuralist approaches associated, at least in part, with the Annales school, have been superseded by the notionally poststructuralist turns of the linguistic screw; total history has yielded to micro history; we all recognize Eurocentrism when we see it. How surprising it is, then, to note how remarkably constant textbooks have been in 2 assessing the import of the French Revolution. From classics of Cold War "Western" historiography to recent efforts to write history within a global framework, the fundamental message remains the same: the Revolution of 1789 is the turning point of the modern world. 1 The wording may vary, but the substance does not. Said to mark "the beginning of modern history," the French Revolution is deemed "a decisive event in world history" that initiated a "century of rapid and tremendous change"; after the events of 1789–1815, "the clock could not really be set back." 2 Authors may emphasize different aspects of this modern period—political Liberalism, triumphant individualism, nationalistic militarism—but their accounts coincide in treating the revolution as an identifiable period of rapid, irreversible change. An evocative but, in this non-geological context, far from precise word—watershed—has provided one popular metaphor for conveying some sense of the revolution's relation to modernity.
    [Show full text]
  • Changing the Narrative
    Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVIII:3 (Winter, 2018), 313–334. Jan de Vries Changing the Narrative: The New History That Was and Is to Come In the mid-1970s, a broad range of scholars, spanning the ideological spectrum, was actively engaged in what has been called the New History. Some of the participants in this broad movement come under discussion below, but for now it is sufficient to mention the French Annales School, the American New Economic History, the British Marxist Social History, and Historical Sociology in several forms, including modernization theorists, comparative revolutions theorists, and world-systems theorists. The adherents to these different historical orientations disagreed with each other about most substantive matters. Their single point of agreement was a shared feindbegrif—the rejection of narrative history. It inspired Burke to introduce the final volume of the New Cambridge Modern History, which appeared in 1979, with the following declaration: “In the twentieth century we have seen a break with traditional narrative history, which, like the break with the traditional novel or with representational art or with classical music, is one of the important cultural discontinuities of our time.”1 Obviously, no single influence can claim full credit for this historiographical discontinuity, but the most profound factor must be the spread of an uncomfortable feeling that the narrative form greatly restricts the types of possible historical questions and feasi- ble modes of explanation. Narrative history has attached to it, like a ball and chain, the discrete, short-term historical event—l’histoire événementielle. If, by the time of Burke’s writing, several decades of Annales School preaching had done anything, it had undermined the notion that this concept should be the foundation stone of historical explanation.
    [Show full text]
  • Syllabus, 21H.991J / STS.210J Theories and Methods in the Study
    Fall 2010 Instructor: Jeff Ravel T 10-1 STS 210J/21H.991J: Theories and Methods in the Study of History Overview We will doggedly ask two questions in this class: “What is history?” and “How do you do it in 2010?” In pursuit of the answers, we will survey a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the last several decades. We will examine how these historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytical discussion of their topic, and the advantages and limitations of their approaches. One concern is the evolution of historical studies in the western tradition, which is not to say that the western approach is the only valid one, nor is it to suggest that we will only read histories of the west. But MIT and many of the institutions in which you will work during your careers are firmly rooted in western intellectual paradigms, and the study of times and places far removed from the western past has been deeply influenced by western historical assumptions. (And, to be honest, this is the historical tradition with which I am most familiar!) We will begin with a brief overview of the construction and deconstruction of historical thinking in the west from the beginnings of Christianity to the present. Then we will consider questions of scale, a major preoccupation of post-WWII historians. In the second half of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, history has been written at the national, global, and micro level.
    [Show full text]
  • Representations of Gender and Age in the 1920S
    JOURNALHirshbein / THEOF FAMILY FLAPPER HISTORY AND THE / January FOGY 2001 THE FLAPPER AND THE FOGY: REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER AND AGE IN THE 1920S Laura Davidow Hirshbein In the 1920s in the United States, public attention was riveted on the antics of a new, rebellious younger generation. Although popular representations focused on youth in crisis, these representations emphasized comparisons between young and old. This article explores the public discussions about youth culture in the 1920s and how they helped to refine cultural categories of youth and old age. In addition, through gender-specific representations, social commentators worked out new definitions of masculinity, femininity, and the relationships between the sexes. Furthermore, the rhetorical conflict between generations of Americans helped to frame important contemporary questions about national identity. In the 1920s in the United States, public attention was riveted on the represented antics of a new, rebellious younger generation. Within the mass culture of the burgeoning magazine and movie industries, as well as the new medium of motion pictures and expansions in advertising, one of the hottest topics of the time was youth.1 Commenta- tors of the time wrote extensively on whether or not the younger generation was lead- ing society toward progress or toward destruction. But while the ostensible topic of these discussions was the behavior of young people, popular representations of youth in crisis depended on a constant series of comparisons between young and old. In this article, I explore the discussions of youth that appeared in popular magazines in the 1920s. I focus on the definitions of youth and old age that emerged from these public discussions, as well as the implications for gender standards and national iden- tity.
    [Show full text]
  • 6 X 10.Long New.P65
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-15463-5 - Cultures of Power in Europe During the Long Eighteen Century Edited by Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms Excerpt More information 1 Introduction: culture and power during the long eighteenth century James J. Sheehan Stanford University In December 1774, seventeen-year-old Carl August, Prince of Saxe Weimar, met the celebrated young author Johann Wolfgang Goethe in a Frankfurt hotel room. The meeting was cordial, indeed the two men got along together so splendidly that, less than a year later, Goethe accepted the prince’s invitation to move to Weimar, where he would spend the rest of his long and incredibly productive life. I begin with this familiar scene – so beautifully rendered and anal- ysed in Nicholas Boyle’s distinguished biography of the poet – because it neatly captures several of the motifs in the complex relationship between culture and power in the eighteenth century.1 First and most obvious is the persistent significance of the court, whose seductive blend of artis- tic possibilities and political influence led Goethe to disregard his father’s opposition and take up residence in Carl August’s small Thuringian state. Second, there is the new significance of public culture, reflected here in Goethe’s position as literary celebrity, which had caused a member of the prince’s entourage to seek out the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther and which would make Goethe such an attractive presence in Carl August’s entourage. Both prince and poet needed one another, both acquired prestige and a kind of power from the other’s presence.
    [Show full text]
  • AHR Forum the Kids Are All Right: on the “Turning” of Cultural History
    AHR Forum The Kids Are All Right: On the “Turning” of Cultural History JAMES W. COOK To situate this introduction, it will be useful to focus briefly on just what con- stituted the cultural turn. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt RUN A FEW WEB SEARCHES FOR the term “cultural turn,” and you will begin to grasp the scope of an increasingly viral concept. In Google Books alone, you will find more than 100,000 citations, the bibliographic traces of the concept’s extended wandering.1 Switch to the search engine at OCLC WorldCat, ArticleFirst, or ECO, and the num- bers become less daunting, somewhere on the order of a few hundred hits. In these more specialized databases, however, the searchable content is limited to titles and abstracts. So what you are really seeing is the initial layers of a much larger con- versation: the figurative tip of the bibliographic iceberg.2 What might the iceberg tell us? Most of all, perhaps, it provides a wide-angle view of the concept’s current ubiquity. In addition to Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt’s 1999 volume Beyond the Cultural Turn, you will find thousands of recent books in- voking “cultural turns” in a wide variety of scholarly contexts—from sociology to My first thanks go to my fellow authors in this forum, especially Judith Surkis and Julia Adeney Thomas, as well as Konstantin Dierks, Sarah Knott, and Robert Schneider, who laid the groundwork for this project. For helpful ideas, readings, criticisms, and encouragements, I am grateful to Eric Slauter, Mer- edith McGill, Ann Fabian, Jackson Lears, Gina Morantz-Sanchez, Mark Hewitson, Marni Sandweiss, Andy Rotter, Tanya Erzen, Rachel St.
    [Show full text]
  • 29 from the Library of Professor Richard B. Dinsmore, Phd FY2006
    From the Library of Professor Richard B. Dinsmore, PhD FY2006 1848 : The Revolutionary Tide in Europe / Peter N. Stearns 500 Popular Annuals and Perennials for American Gardeners / Edited by Loretta Barnard About Philosophy / Robert Paul Wolff Absolutism and Enlightenment, 1660-1789 / R. W. Harris Action Française; Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France Action Française; Die-Hard Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century France Adding on / Editors of Time-Life Books Advanced Woodworking / Editors of Time-Life Books After Everything : Western Intellectual History Since 1945 / Roland N. Stromberg Age of Louis XIV Age of Nationalism and Reform, 1850-1890 Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 Age of the Economist / Daniel R. Fusfeld Age of Controversy: Discussion Problems in 20th Century European History / Gordon Wright Alexander the Great : Legacy of a Conqueror / Winthrop Lindsay Adams All Quiet on the Western Front / Erich Maria Remarque All About Market Timing : The Easy Way to Get Started / Leslie N. Masonson An Intellectual History of Modern Europe / Roland N. Stromberg Ancien Régime; French Society 1600-1750. Translated by Steve Cox Ancien Régime / Hubert Méthivier Ancient Near Eastern Tradition Ancient World Ancient Near East Anticlericalism; Conflict Between Church & State in France, Italy, and Spain / J. S. Schapiro Antony and Cleopatra / Louis B. Wright and Virginia Lamar Army of the Republic, 1871-1914 / David B. Ralston Art of Cross-Examination / Francis L. Wellman Artisans and Sans-culottes; Popular Movements in France and Britain... / Gwyn A. Williams Aspects of Western Civilization : Problems and Sources in History / Edited by Perry M. Rogers Aspects of Western Civilization : Problems and Sources in History / Edited by Perry M.
    [Show full text]
  • MAIN LIBRARY Author Title Areas of History Aaron, Daniel, and Robert
    MAIN LIBRARY Author Title Areas of History Aaron, Daniel, and Robert Bendiner The Strenuous Decade: A Social and Intellectual Record of the 1930s United States Aaronson, Susan A. Are There Trade-Offs When Americans Trade? United States Aaronson, Susan A. Trade and the American Dream: A Social History of Postwar Trade Policy United States Abbey, Edward Abbey's Road United States Abdill, George B. Civil War Railroads Military Abel, Donald C. Fifty Readings Plus: An Introduction to Philosophy World Abels, Richard Alfred The Great Europe Abernethy, Thomas P. A History of the South: The South in the New Nation, 1789-1819 (p.1996) (Vol. IV) United States Abrams, M. H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature Literature Abramson, Rudy Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 United States Absalom, Roger Italy Since 1800 Europe Abulafia, David The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms Europe Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination United States Abzug, Robert Inside the Vicious Heart Europe Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart Literature Achenbaum, W. Andrew Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 United States Acton, Edward Russia: The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, 2nd ed. Europe Adams, Arthur E. Imperial Russia After 1861 Europe Adams, Arthur E., et al. Atlas of Russian and East European History Europe Adams, Henry Democracy: An American Novel Literature Adams, James Trustlow The Founding of New England United States Adams, Simon Winston Churchill: From Army Officer to World Leader Europe Adams, Walter R. The Blue Hole Literature Addams, Jane Twenty Years at Hull-House United States Adelman, Paul Gladstone, Disraeli, and Later Victorian Politics Europe Adelman, Paul The Rise of the Labour Party, 1880-1945 Europe Adenauer, Konrad Memoirs, 1945-1953 Europe Adkin, Mark The Charge Europe Adler, Mortimer J.
    [Show full text]
  • HIS6061/2513: Introduction to Historiography, Spring 2017 (DRAFT 2) Course Meets
    HIS6061/2513: Introduction to Historiography, Spring 2017 (DRAFT 2) Course Meets: Mondays, 3‐6pm Location: in the seminar room on the ground floor of Keene Flint Instructor: Dr. Louise Newman, Associate Professor of History, [email protected] Office Hours: Wed, 3‐4pm, in Keene Flint 212 “The very possibility of historical scholarship as an enterprise distinct from propaganda requires of its practitioners that vital minimum of ascetic self‐discipline that enables a person to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and, most important of all, suspend or bracket one's own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers.” ‐‐Thomas L. Haskell, “Objectivity is not Neutrality” (1990), 132. Course Description This course introduces graduate students to some of the key concepts and challenges faced by practicing historians today, in reading, researching, and writing history at the professional level. The syllabus is divided into three parts; First we will read some theoretical/philosophical works that examine the assumptions and methods of academic historians, exploring how the discipline has changed over recent decades and considering such concepts as objectivity, narrativity, causality, agency, representation, truth, evidence, etc. Then we will study some exemplary monographs drawn from students' major fields of interest, enabling us to explore how historians frame their questions, engage in conversations with others, and justify the significance, or usefulness of their work. In the final segment of the course, students will write an historiographical essay on scholarship of their choosing.
    [Show full text]
  • 18Th – 19Th-Century Europe (Kilian Harrer, 2018) (Pdf)
    Kilian Harrer, Preliminary exam, reading list: Europe, c. 1650-1850 Spring 2018 Supervising professors: Daniel Ussishkin, Kathryn Ciancia NB: works highlighted in yellow are also on my French history reading list. Sovereignty and the Making of Modern Statehood Armitage, David and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bell, David A. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007. Bell, David A. Napoleon: A Concise Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Brewer, John. The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Broers, Michael. Europe under Napoleon 1799-1815. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. [focus on Foucault’s lectures] Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Furet, François. La Révolution, de Turgot à Jules Ferry: 1770-1880. Paris: Hachette, 1988. Gierowski, Józef Andrzej. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century: From Anarchy to Well-Organised State. Kraków: Nakład Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności, 1996. Hanley, Sarah. “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France.” French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (1989): 4-27. Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Revolution 1789-1848. New York: Praeger, 1969 [1962]. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1957]. Knott, Sarah.
    [Show full text]
  • A Life of Learning Lynn Hunt
    CHARLES HOMER HASKINS PRIZE LECTURE FOR 2019 A Life of Learning Lynn Hunt ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 76 The 2019 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture was presented at the ACLS Annual Meeting in New York, New York on April 26, 2019. © 2019 by Lynn Hunt CONTENTS On Charles Homer Haskins iv Haskins Prize Lecturers v On Lynn Hunt vi Introduction vii by Pauline Yu A Life of Learning 1 by Lynn Hunt ON CHARLES HOMER HASKINS Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), for whom the ACLS lecture series is named, organized the founding of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1919 and served as its first chairman from 1920 to 1926. He received a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University at the age of 20. Appointed an instructor at the Univer- sity of Wisconsin, Haskins became a full professor in two years. After 12 years there, he moved to Harvard University, where he served as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1908 to 1924. At the time of his retirement in 1931, he was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History. A close advisor to President Woodrow Wilson (whom he had met at Johns Hop- kins), Haskins attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as chief of the Division of Western Europe of the American Commis- sion to Negotiate Peace. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1922, and was a founder and the second president of the Medieval Academy of America in 1926–27. A great American teacher, Haskins also did much to establish the reputation of American scholarship abroad.
    [Show full text]