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 Barry Schwartz has received the William A. Owens Award for this year. The Owens Award recognizes an outstanding body of scholarly or creative activities in the social and behavioral sciences that has already gained national and international recognition.
Schwartz is America’s leading sociologist on history and collective memory. He is author of five books, including the highly esteemed George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol. Since 1982, Schwartz has devoted himself to learning how historians and commemorative agents work independently yet concurrently to represent the past, and how these representations, ranging from history texts to museums and monuments, mirror the nation’s values while providing frameworks that mold the historical consciousness of individuals. Schwartz has addressed these issues in several works on American presidents and in comparative studies of the United States, Germany, Israel, Korea and China.
His most recent book, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, develops these and related themes, using quantitative and qualitative evidence to explain why Lincoln’s reputation fell during the four decades following his assassination, rose abruptly during the Progressive Era and assumed epic proportions during World War I. This volume, the first part of a study following Lincoln through the late 20th century, when he becomes a symbol of racial equality, shows American institutions shaping the past imaginatively and selectively, but never arbitrarily.
Schwartz addresses theoretical issues of considerable scope and importance. He has a fundamental concern with how our views of past events are shaped yet by no means wholly determined by present political and social interests, and how the present is in turn illuminated by the collective memory. Throughout his work, he returns to the basic issues of social and cultural cohesion, the tension between social continuity and change, and the individual’s craving for orientation and meaning. |
