While at Smith College, Curti published his first book,
The American Peace Crusade, 1815–1860 (1929). The book, based on his dissertation, was written after
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (who had replaced Turner at Harvard) rejected his first dissertation proposal which was essentially an early version of
The Growth of American Thought. Curti taught at
Beloit College,
Smith College, and
Columbia University, then in 1942 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he taught for 25 years. He also taught in Japan, Australia, and India, and lectured throughout Europe.
Peace studies Moving to
Teachers College at Columbia in 1931, he published a book on
William Jennings Bryan and world peace (
Bryan and World Peace). It was followed by
Peace or War: The American Struggle in 1936. With these works, Curti helped found
peace and conflict studies as a field of study. He criticized pacifists for ignoring major social changes—especially the repudiation of old-fashioned competitive capitalism by the
New Deal, and the need to repudiate imperial greed if peace were to be achieved. In 1964 he helped found the Conference on Peace Research in History, now called the Peace History Society.
The Roots of American Loyalty (1946) was a history of patriotism. Curti developed his global vision through travels; he taught in Japan, Australia and India for two years. He left the Episcopal faith of his boyhood for Unitarianism. Although never a Marxist, he voted for Socialist presidential candidates in the name of world peace.
Intellectual history Curti turned his attention to
intellectual history and helped to establish that field as a distinct academic discipline. His first foray in the field was
The Social Ideals of American Educators, published in 1935. In 1944, Curti won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his masterwork,
The Growth of American Thought. Its chapters show an encyclopedic knowledge of thinkers great and small from the colonial period to the present, together with his commitment to democracy as a process springing from the ideas of the people. Curti adapted
Turner's frontier thesis to intellectual history, arguing, "Because the American environment, physical and social, differed from that of Europe, Americans, confronted by different needs and problems, adapted the European intellectual heritage in their own way. And because American life came increasingly to differ from European life, American ideas, American agencies of intellectual life, and the use made of knowledge likewise came to differ in America from their European counterparts." (p vi) Unlike some of the other leaders of the American Studies program, he paid little attention to myths and symbols. Unlike
Perry Miller at Harvard, who strongly influenced a new generation of intellectual historians, Curti never delved too deeply into the internal
history of ideas, preferring to link them to multiple external social and economic factors. His book was not so much a history of American thought as a social history of American thought, with strong attention to the social and economic forces that shaped that thought from the bottom up.
New social history In the 1950s Curti undertook a collaborative social history of rural
Trempealeau County, Wisconsin using avant-garde quantitative analysis of census records. The book which came out of the project,
The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (1959) immediately became a pioneer work in what would soon be dubbed the
"new social history." Curti's wife Margaret Wooster Curti, provided some of the quantitative methodology. Historians, however, did not emulate it, preferring instead to follow
Stephan Thernstrom's model in
Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century American City (1964), which used a similar methodology of tracking workers through their careers using censuses and city directories. The difference was urban and rural—urban history was exploding, and rural history was a backwater; in addition, the Thernstrom model was easier to replicate by a graduate student writing a Ph.D. thesis alone (Curti had numerous research assistants and coauthors). Whereas the "old" social history comprised descriptions of everyday lifestyles, perhaps with a coverage of grass roots political movements (like the
Populists), Curti's "new" social history was a systematic examination of the entire population using statistics and social science methodologies.
Teaching In 1942, Curti was called to the Frederick Jackson Turner Professorship of History at the University of Wisconsin, one of the nation's most influential centers of historical scholarship; he retired from the department in 1968. Curti continued to write after retirement, keeping up to date his influential textbook
Rise of the American Nation (1st ed. 1950), coauthored with
Lewis Todd, which went through many editions after their deaths. The Wisconsin department of history was notorious for the angry feuds among the senior professors, which Curti, mild-mannered and small of stature, completely ignored. Curti supervised 86 finished doctoral dissertations at Columbia and Wisconsin, including many who became well-known scholars:
Richard Hofstadter on
social Darwinism;
John Higham on nativism; Bourke on community studies; Allen Davis on Progressivism and
Jane Addams; and
Roderick Nash on the environment. Curti allowed his students a free hand in content and methodology. He encouraged his students constantly, wrote highly detailed critiques of their chapters, protected them from intradepartmental feuds, helped them get funding, and found them jobs through the "old boys" network of which he was an accomplished maestro, writing hundreds of letters a month to friends and ex-students across the globe. == Memberships, awards and honors ==