John A. Garraty

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  John Arthur Garraty was born on the 4th of July, 1920, a date that would seem almost too on-the-nose for a man who spent his career writing American history. He died on the 19th of December, 2007, having shaped how several generations of students understood their country's past. But how does a historian who served in World War II as a swimming instructor in the Merchant Marine end up consulting on Saturday morning children's television? And what does it mean when a biographer invites his own subject's grandson to argue back inside the footnotes of the book itself? Those questions open a window into a career that was as inventive as it was prolific.

• 2. From Brooklyn to Columbia

  ›

  Brooklyn College handed Garraty his undergraduate degree in 1941, and Columbia University granted his doctorate seven years later in 1948. Those seven years were not spent entirely in libraries. During World War II, Garraty served in the United States Merchant Marine, and the role the Navy assigned him was not one that appears in many historians' biographies: swimming instructor. After the war, he built his teaching career at Michigan State University, where he stayed for 12 years before Columbia called him back. He joined the Columbia University History Department in 1959, and he would remain there until he retired from teaching in 1990.

• 3. The Lodge Biography and Its Footnotes

  ›

  In 1953, Knopf published Garraty's biography of Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts politician who lived from 1850 to 1924. No scholarly, authoritative life of Lodge had existed before that book. What made this biography genuinely unusual was not just its subject but a structural choice Garraty made during the writing process. He invited Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Lodge's grandson, to write his own footnotes directly into the text. Lodge Jr., who lived from 1902 to 1985, used those footnotes to push back against Garraty's interpretations and findings. A biographer deliberately engineering space for disagreement inside his own work is a rare act of intellectual confidence. That spirit carried through to a later book, The Art of Biography, published by Knopf in 1960, which turned the craft itself into the subject.

• 4. Textbooks and School House Rock

  ›

  The American Nation became the textbook many college and high school students used to study their country's past, with later editions co-written with Mark C. Carnes. Garraty's reach into classrooms was not limited to bound volumes. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked as a historical consultant on film and media projects, and the most prominent of those was School House Rock, the children's television shorts that taught civics and history in song to a generation of young viewers. A historian who also shaped how children encountered the past through Saturday morning television occupied an unusually broad position in American public life. His editorial work was similarly large-scale: he co-edited The Columbia History of the World, published in 1972, bringing together a sweeping survey of global history under a single cover.

• 5. The American National Biography

  ›

  Garraty served as president of the Society of American Historians, a position that reflected his standing among peers. His largest single project may have been the one he carried into retirement: serving as one of the general editors of the American National Biography. That reference work is a comprehensive collection of biographical entries on significant figures in American history. Garraty completed his editorial work on it after leaving Columbia in 1990, finishing in retirement a project that matched the scope of a career spent writing, teaching, and explaining American lives to American readers.