James Harvey Robinson

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James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936), American historian, was the central figure in the New History movement, which attempted to use history to understand contemporary problems.

James Harvey Robinson was born on June 29, 1863, in Bloomington, Ill., the son of a local banker. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard and did his doctoral work at the University of Freiburg. There he studied under Hermann von Holst, the constitutional historian, and wrote a dissertation on the Federal principle in the American constitution.

Robinson's first teaching position was in European history at the University of Pennsylvania, where the welfare economist Simon N. Patten, who had helped him secure the job, influenced him. After a year Robinson moved to Columbia University as an associate professor of European history and became active on the curriculum subcommittee of the National Education Association for history. In 1895 he became a full professor.

At Columbia, Robinson shared progressive, reformist views with colleagues like John Dewey and continued to develop his New History idea. This historiography movement believed in history as an instrument in helping solve contemporary problems, concentrated upon the life of the common man, and cooperated with other social sciences. Robinson's concepts appeared in his course, "The Intellectual History of Western Europe," which his students called "The Downfall of Christianity."

Robinson's first textbook, An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (1902), although quite popular, was more conventional than innovative. The ideas of the New History did not appear in significant text form until The Development of Modern Europe (1907), written in collaboration with his most famous student, Charles A. Beard. A group of Robinson's essays, all but one previously published, appeared in The New History (1912). This book brought together his ideas and remains the representative work in the movement.

In 1919 Robinson resigned from Columbia to help found the New School for Social Research. There he was chairman of the executive committee and taught one course. He continued to write, producing two popular polemical books - The Mind in the Making (1921), a best seller, and The Humanizing of Knowledge (1923). These books held that a just social order could be created by applied intelligence. Robinson's ideas remained constant until his death on Feb. 16, 1936, in New York City; this is obvious in the collection of his essays edited by his student Harry Elmer Barnes and published posthumously as The Human Comedy (1937).

Further Reading

Luther V. Hendricks, James Harvey Robinson: Teacher of History (1946), is short but good and includes a comprehensive bibliography of Robinson's writings. Harry Elmer Barnes's sketch of Robinson in Howard Odum, ed., American Masters of Social Science: An Approach to the Study of the Social Studies through a Neglected Field of Biography (1927), is the appraisal of an enthusiastic disciple. Harvey Wish's introduction to the paperback edition of Robinson's The New History (1965) is balanced and succinct.

Robinson, James Harvey, 1863-1936, American historian, b. Bloomington, Ill. He taught history at the Univ. of Pennsylvania (1891-95) and Columbia (1895-1919), becoming a full professor in 1895. In 1919, he was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research (now New School Univ.), of which he was the first director. Through his writings and lectures, in which he stressed the "new history"-the social, scientific, and intellectual progress of humanity rather than merely political happenings-he exerted an important influence on the study and teaching of history. An editor (1892-95) of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he was also an associate editor (1912-20) of the American Historical Review and president (1929) of the American Historical Association.

Quotes:

"Our goal, simply stated, is to be the best."

"We have unprecedented conditions to deal with and novel adjustments to make -- there can be no doubt of that. We also have a great stock of scientific knowledge unknown to our grandfathers with which to operate. So novel are the conditions, so copious the knowledge, that we must undertake the arduous task of reconsidering a great part of the opinions about man and his relations to his fellow men which have been handed down to us by previous generations who lived in far other conditions and possessed far less information about the world and themselves. We have, however, first to create an unprecedented attitude of mind to cope with unprecedented conditions, and to utilize unprecedented knowledge."

"One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase getting something for nothing, as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society. Except for our animal outfit, practically all we have is handed us gratis. Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic, and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing."

"Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do."

"We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are."

• Genres: Blues

Biography

From all accounts, this man is one of the most versatile and intriguing musicians to come out of the blues genre. The factors behind his obscurity and paltry number of sides under his own name might have something to do with how common his name was, as well as his own professional decision to drop "The Bat" from his stagename, removing an identifying characteristic that prior to the second World War had at least kept him seperate from everyone else in the music business named James Robinson. There are indeed so many players with this name that it is even possible to find one with the same birthday as James "The Bat" Robinson--New Orleans jazz trombonist Jim Robinson was also born on Christmas Day. A blues and jazz fanatic could celebrate this "Robinson-mas" by paying tribute to a musiican who created authentic country blues, then went on to take part in the urban Chicago blues scene and even show up on a few anthologies of early rock and roll alongside guitarist Lonnie Mack.

This epic recording career began in the early '30s. The Rosetta Stone of the James "The Bat" Robinson experience is the 1931 session that produced three classic titles, "You Left Me Alone", "Bat's Own Blues" and "A Humming Blues", sometimes just known as "Humming Blues". Under either name, this is a track unlike any other, featuring Robinson both singing and humming as well as playing piano, plus some banjo from Ed Hudson that puts the whole thing in a genre netherworld. These tracks also represent a thick lava pit for blues scholars who, like the sabre tooth tigers of old, might get mired and eventually devoured by confusing details. There were also somewhat similar recordings released under the name of Bat "The Hummingbird" Robinson, including "Bat's Blues", presenting a contrasting stigma of ownership from the previously mentioned "Bat's Own Blues". While everything points in the direction of these tracks also being the work of James Robinson, the strange Bat "The Hummingbird" Robinson pseudonynm was also used by the well-known boogie woogie pianist Cow Cow Davenport, most likely to allow him to wander onto pastures previously restricted as per recording contracts.

This period of Robinson's career was marked by novel instrumental versatility that put him in the one-man band league. The later work of artists such as Doctor Ross The Harmonica Boss and Driftin' Slim is somewhat similar to these '30s recordings. Robinson also recorded on guitar and harmonica, so was quite capable of jumping in just about anywhere in a blues combo, much like traditional Appalachian musicians who learn to play the whole family of acoustic stringed instruments. Following the second World War, however, Robinson began to work almost solely as a piano player, and always as simply James Robinson. He was associated with artists such as Lonnie Johnson and Tiny Bradshaw. The former leader conducted some 1951 sessions that are absolute gems, featuring wailing from Red Prysock on tenor sax and the slick bass and guitar combination of brothers Clarence and Lonnie Mack. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi

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