Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk (February 21, 1899 in Brooklyn – June 23, 1975 in Chicago[1][2]) was an American
historian, an expert on
Lafayette and the
French Revolution. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, where he was the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History.[3][4]
Biography
He was born as Louis Gottschalk, the sixth of eight children of Morris and Anna (née Krystal) Gottschalk, Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn from
Poland.[2] He graduated from Cornell University with an A.B. in 1919, A.M. in 1920, and the Ph.D. in 1921, under the supervision of
Carl L. Becker.[5] During World War I, he served as an apprentice seaman from October 4, 1918, to
November 11, 1918, a total of thirty eight days, at the Naval Unit at Cornell in
Ithaca, New York.[6] He taught briefly at the University of Illinois,[2][5] and joined the University of Louisville faculty in 1923,[2][5][7][8] but resigned in protest in 1927 after a friend and colleague in the history department was fired as part of an attempt by the university administration to abolish
tenure.[2] He joined the University of Chicago in 1927, was promoted to full professor in 1935, and chaired the history department from 1937 to 1942.[4] He was given his
endowed chair, the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professorship of History, in 1959.[4] In 1965, facing forced retirement from Chicago, he moved again to the University of Illinois at Chicago so that he could continue teaching.[4][5]
He met poet
Laura Riding, then known by her maiden name, Laura Reichenthal, while she was a student at Cornell and he was a graduate assistant there. They married on November 2, 1920, and he took her last name as his middle name. However, they divorced in 1925.[2][10] He later married Fruma Kasden, in 1930; they had two sons.[2][4] Fruma Gottschalk later taught Russian at the University of Chicago, and died in 1995.[11]
Awards and honors
Gottschalk was a
Guggenheim Fellow in 1928 and 1954,[4] and a Center for Advanced study of the Behavioral Sciences fellow in 1957.
In 1953 he was honored as Chevalier in the
Legion of Honor and in 1954 he won a Fulbright award.[4]
He received honorary doctorates from the
University of Toulouse,
Hebrew Union College, and the University of Louisville.[5]
In 1965 his students presented him with a
festschrift, Ideas in History: Essays Presented to Louis Gottschalk by his Former Students,
Duke University Press.[3]
A series of lectures is named for him at the
University of Louisville.[14] The annual $1000 Louis
Gottschalk Prize, named in his honor, is given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies to the author of "an outstanding historical or critical study".[15]
The Foundations of the Modern World [1300–1775], Allen & Unwin, 1969
Toward the French Revolution: Europe & America in the Eighteenth-Century… Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973,
ISBN978-0-684-13699-8
The use of personal documents in history, anthropology, and sociology Editors Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk, Clyde Kluckhohn, Robert Cooley Angell, Social Science Research Council, 1945
^
abcdefgKleber, John E. (2001), "Gottschalk, Louis Reichenthal", The encyclopedia of Louisville, Volume 2000, University Press of Kentucky, p. 346,
ISBN978-0-8131-2100-0.
^
abcStewart, John Hall (1970), "Louis Gottschalk and Lafayette", The Journal of Modern History, 42 (4): 637–648,
doi:
10.1086/244043,
JSTOR1905833,
S2CID144695227. Review of Gottschalk and Maddox, Laffayette in the French Revolution: Through the October Days, University of Chicago Press, 1969.
^
abcdefghCrocker, Lester G. (1976). "Louis R. Gottschalk (1899–1975)". American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Professional Notes. Eighteenth-Century Studies. 9 (3): 474–476.
JSTOR2737529.
^Ancestry.com. New York, U.S., Abstracts of World War I Military Service, 1917-1919 [database on-line]. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2013.
^Parini, Jay (2004), The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature: William Faulkner – Mina Loy, Oxford University Press, p. 285,
ISBN978-0-19-516725-2