About Arthur M. Schlesinger:
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr. was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causes (such as economic profit and conflict between businessmen and farmers) and downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors. He was highly influential as a director of PhD dissertations at Harvard for three decades, especially in the fields of social, women's, and immigration history. His son Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007), also taught at Harvard and was also a noted historian.