My mentor, Edward Countryman, a great historian and citizen of the world. May his memory be for a blessing. Thread to come. www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/edward-countryman-obituary?id=58022084%26utm_source%3Dfacebook%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_campaign%3Dobitsharebeta - ThreadSky

dwaldstreicher.bsky.social • 43 days ago

My mentor, Edward Countryman, a great historian and citizen of the world. May his memory be for a blessing. Thread to come. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/edward-countryman-obituary?id=58022084%26utm_source%3Dfacebook%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_campaign%3Dobitsharebeta

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dwaldstreicher.bsky.social•43 days ago

Ed was born in Glens Falls, NY & earned his BA at Manhattan College. In grad school at Cornell he studied with Clinton Rossiter, James Morton Smith, Joel Silbey, and Hannah Arendt. The diss. in 1971 was a “purely institutional study” of political parties in the NY legislature post-independence.

dwaldstreicher.bsky.social•43 days ago

2/ Already, though, he was reading broadly, influenced by ascendant behavioral political science and increasingly by European Marxist historians who had focused on rural and urban crowds, both of which had been so important in revolutionary New York.

dwaldstreicher.bsky.social•43 days ago

3/ In a series of articles he began to focus on mobilization, politicization, transformation, and legitimation. This work culminated in A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790. The book won universal praise & shared the Bancroft Prize in 1981.

dwaldstreicher.bsky.social•43 days ago

4/ Teaching first at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and then at University of Warwick in England gave Countryman an outsider’s insider perspective on the American Revolution and the difference it made in U.S. history, and perhaps also on the dangers of overspecialization and “schools.”

dwaldstreicher.bsky.social•43 days ago

5/He was the only historian with essays in both Al Young’s 1976 & 1993 collections of “neo-progressive” studies of the Revolution. He carried on Young’s exemplary mentorship of younger scholars after he emerged as a leading synthesizer with The American Revolution (1985, revised ed. 2005).

dwaldstreicher.bsky.social•43 days ago

6/ Ed developed a punchy, straightforward style that made new scholarly concepts strikingly accessible. The American Revolution was deeply appreciated by peers for “integrat[ing] the new research on social groups with the work that has been done on political and ideological issues" (Joyce Appleby)