History Over Time

M ) ~Y love affair with history was the result of shared experience and observation in what has been the best of centuries and the worst of centuries. I was not quite six years old when in June i9io Theodore Roosevelt staged his dramatic return from his safari in Africa. My father hoisted me on his shoulders so that I could see the parade up Fifth Avenue. Later that afternoon I recall there was a violent hailstorm perhaps presaging stormy years ahead for T.R. and the nation he hoped once more to lead. As a high school student at Townsend Harris Hall, I marched down Fifth Avenue in i9i8 along with thousands for both the false armistice and the real one four days later. I was swept into history not only by the stirring events of the World War I years but by the imaginative pedagogy of two of my Townsend Harris Hall teachers, Herman Gray, later a professor of law at New York University Law School, and Austin Baxter Keep, then deep into his researches on the early libraries of colonial New York. My enthusiasm for history was sustained by several members of the faculty of City College, where I pursued my undergraduate studies-notably by Nelson P. Mead and J. Salwyn Schapiro. Mead had recently returned from Paris, where he had been a member of City College president Sidney Mezes's Inquiry at the peace conference, and he provided his students with an up-to-date, information-packed and highly systematic version of World War I, without the advantages afforded by hindsight. He was basically a colonial historian who had completed his doctorate at Columbia under Herbert L. Osgood, a profound scholar whose massive institutional history of the American colonies shaped study and teaching for a whole generation. From the Europeanist J. Salwyn Schapiro, I learned to appreciate intellectual and social history, the role played by ideology and isms. Remember, it was a generation when James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard were very much in vogue, and historians were becoming increasingly aware of social and cultural concerns and somewhat less involved in the traditional political framework. If my undergraduate education contributed to my becoming something of a historical maverick for that time, it was in no small part due to the tutelage of Professor Morris Raphael Cohen, the eminent philosopher, whose course in the philosophy of law introduced me to my literary hero, Frederic William Maitland, as well as to a host of modern writers in European juristic thought and legal history. As an undergraduate I had already done enough reading in the sources for American colonial law to have recognized certain fallacies in Roscoe Pound's Spirit of the Common

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