The American historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger (1888-1965) was one of the pioneers in the study of the social aspects of American history.

Arthur M. Schlesinger was born in Xenia, Ohio, on Feb. 27, 1888, the son of a first-generation immigrant. Schlesinger graduated in 1910 from Ohio State University. As a graduate student at Columbia, he was influenced by Herbert Levi Osgood, James Harvey Robinson, and Charles A. Beard. His dissertation, finished in 1917, was The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (1918), which Sir Denis Brogan called "perhaps the most remarkable Ph.D. dissertation in modern American historiography." Schlesinger had used Osgood's methods and Beard's insights.

While finishing his dissertation, Schlesinger taught at Ohio State, beginning in 1912. He became a full professor in 1917, the same year he received his doctorate. During his stay at Ohio State, he married Elizabeth Bancroft. In 1919 he moved to the State University of Iowa as chairman of the...