The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, a historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus" whom 21st-century scholars continue to... consult because his intellectually engaging books and essays remain pertinent to illuminating contemporary history. His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 ; The American Political Tradition ; The Age of Reform ; Anti-intellectualism in American Life , and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics . He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when Richard was ten.
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