Here's more.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Before this gets all partisan of ugly about her neo-con views, I will quote the following.
Gertrude Himmelfarb - Wikipedia "Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Bertha (née Lerner) and Max Himmelfarb, both of Russian Jewish background.[5] She received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1942 and her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. Himmelfarb later went on to study at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
. ..She was long involved in Jewish conservative intellectual circles.[7] Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. She served on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1991, she delivered the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the president of the United States of America. ..
Himmelfarb was a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices. Her book, The New History and the Old (published in 1987 and revised and expanded in 2004), is a critique of the varieties of "new history" that have sought to displace the old. The "New Histories" she critiqued include: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history, but relies on partial and dubious data;[9] Marxist historiography derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the protagonists and events of history;[10] psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence;[11] analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure;[12] social history, "history from the bottom", that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history);[13][14][15] and, later, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.[16]
….Himmelfarb has argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values (she prefers the term 'virtues'), such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self-reliance, into American political life and policy-making".[23]
While she is identified in America as a conservative, in Britain people on the left admire her work. One of her most outspoken admirers is Gordon Brown, the former Labour Party Prime Minister. His introduction to the British edition of Roads to Modernity opens: "I have long admired Gertrude Himmelfarb's historical work, in particular her love of the history of ideas, and her work has stayed with me ever since I was a history student at Edinburgh University."[24]
In an obituary, David Brooks described Himmelfarb as "The Historian of Moral Revolution".[2
In other words, this was an intellectual giant, right or wrong, who had a hell of a lot to say about history, its documentation and morality. Sne was a philosopher, and a writer and we should be saddened when those folks are silenced.
RIP.
