He was attacked by many of the leading conservative critics, including Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Reagan, who told the New York Times in 1996 that Levine’s work was an example of “the left deliberately misconstruing the arguments of its opponents while offering no substantive evidence of its own.” “The Opening of the American Mind” pushed him to the forefront of the national debate about multicultural education. In the late 1980s he was instrumental in developing a requirement that all new undergraduates take a class on America’s racial and ethnic past. He later helped lead efforts to broaden cultural studies on campus.
HIGHBROW LOWBROW LEVINE FREE
During the Berkeley Free Speech movement, Levine defended students who protested the ban on political activity on campus. to draw attention to blacks’ struggle for voting rights. He also joined other historians who marched in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 with the Rev. He joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s, participating in sit-ins to integrate businesses in the Bay Area. His early experiences “clearly had an impact on the way he saw the world,” his wife, Cornelia, told The Times on Tuesday. He helped his father, a Lithuanian immigrant, run a fruit and vegetable store, even while a student at City College of New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955, and at Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree in 1957 and a PhD in 1962. Levine was born to a working-class family in New York City on Feb. He wanted to recover that achievement and analyze it.” These are the intellectual and cultural achievements of ordinary people. Particularly in “Black Culture and Black Consciousness,” Rosenzweig said, Levine demonstrated that intellectual history is “not just the study of Emerson and Thoreau but the study of Negro spirituals and folk tales. Levine joined the history faculty at George Mason in 1994 after 32 years at Berkeley.
“He was really one of the key people who invented the field of American cultural history,” said Roy Rosenzweig, founder and director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia. The most admired of his books was “Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom” (1977), an engaging examination of black oral expression - including spirituals, gospel songs, folklore and humor - that demonstrated the richness and diversity of black culture from the slavery era to more modern times. Levine advocated a catholic definition of culture in several books written over the last four decades, including “Highbrow and Lowbrow, The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America” (1988). Levine, a former UC Berkeley historian and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient whose elegant scholarship bolstered arguments for multiculturalism in higher education, died of cancer Oct.
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