OSCAR HANDLIN - TYPESCRIPT SIGNED - HFSID 190133

OSCAR HANDLIN
The famous American historian and history professor at Harvard University signs this excerpt from his 1964 book Fire-bell in the Night, which criticized white supremacists and suburban liberals but also criticized leftist for their Communist-inspired solutions
Typescript Letter: "Oscar Handlin" in blue ink. 8½x11. One page. In full: "An Unfinished Task. For a few weeks in a stunned nation the hope flickered that President Kennedy's assassination might, after all, be the occasion for a breakthrough in the interracial strife. Perhaps enactment of a program that meant much to him would give meaning to his martyrdom. Public opinion polls in December showed that Americans felt a sense of personal remorse and a guilty consciousness that they had done too little to further the spirit and practice of brotherhood. More specifically, an impressive percentage of them connected the tragedy in Dallas with the need for advancing the status of the Negro. But when the emotion of the aftermath drained away, it became clear that no miracle had occurred. President Johnson did indeed persuade Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, to begin hearings on the civil rights bill in January. Yet as those at last lumbered toward a conclusion, it was apparent that the alignments of a year before had hardly changed.  Meanwhile, the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling against school segregation approached. In May 1954 a unanimous decision had struck down the concept of "separate but equal" that for sixty years had sustained the inferior position of the Negro. At the time, the Court's ruling seemed the start of a genuine social revolution, coming as it did after a long series of lesser gains. There were grounds then for a belief that ancient wrongs would steadily be righted. A decade later, the outcome is still not certain. The place of the Negro in American life has changed significantly, but the consequences have not been those anticipated in 1954. Oscar Handlin". American historian Oscar Handlin (1915-2011) received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1940, the year after he joined the faculty there, teaching primarily U.S. social and economic history. A prolific author, Handlin was awarded the Pulitizer Prize in History for The Uprooted (1951), a history of the immigration movement in the U.S. after 1820. Many of his books were written in collaboration with his first wife, Mary Flug Handlin, and Handlin also wrote a monthly book column for "Atlantic Monthly". A full professor at Harvard from 1954, Handlin was Director of the University Library from 1979-1983. Lightly toned and creased. Otherwise, fine condition.