Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) was an American historian. His popular books on the political, social, and intellectual trends and sociological interpretations of American history garnered two Pulitzer Prizes.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Hofstadter was educated at Buffalo University and Columbia. He taught at the University of Maryland 1942–46. He then returned to teach at Columbia 1946–70, staying there for the rest of his career.
Hofstadter’s doctoral thesis was published as Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860–1915 (1944.) The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948) similarly examined ideological rationale and disguise in studying the impulses behind prominent American politicians and statesmen’s careers.
Hofstadter’s works include The Age of Reform (1955; Pulitzer,) Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963; Pulitzer,) The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (1955) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965.)
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The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.
—Richard Hofstadter
Memory is the thread of personal identity, history of public identity.
—Richard Hofstadter
A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism-a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.
—Richard Hofstadter
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