Henry Steele Commager

Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998) was an American historian who helped define modern liberalism in the United States, for two generations, through his 40 books and 700 essays and reviews. His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950), which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s, and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). In addition, he edited one of the most widely used compilations, Documents of American History, which went through 10 editions between 1938 and 1988 (the tenth, and last, coedited with Commager's former student, Milton Cantor).