Levine, Lawrence W. 1933-2006 (Lawrence William Levine)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born February 27, 1933, in New York, NY; died of cancer, October 23, 2006, in Berkeley, CA. Historian, educator, and author. Levine was a history professor known for his groundbreaking views on American culture and its evolution. A 1955 graduate of the City College of New York, he completed his graduate work at Columbia, where he earned an M.A. in 1957 and a Ph.D. in 1962. After teaching briefly at City College and at Princeton University, he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1962. He would teach there until 1984, whereupon he moved to George Mason University, where he spent his last years of academia. Levine was known for challenging certain popular conceptions of American culture and history among his colleagues. For example, he responded to Allan Bloom's criticism of college curricula by writing in The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture and History (1996) that including classes about other cultures outside of western Europe and America represented an improvement in education. Also holding that American culture was not, in fact, a "melting pot" of ethnic cultures, he characterized it instead as a kind of mosaic in which ethnic and racial groups were separate but still could interact with each other. In his most acclaimed book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), Levine drew on everything from religion and folklore to music and humor to enlighten readers about the evolution of African American culture. Levine, in short, celebrated American diversity and felt there was no need for complete assimilation of cultures in the United States. Among his other writings are Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (1993), and The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR (2002), which was written with his wife, Cornelia.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2006, p. B10.

New York Times, October 28, 2006, p. A25.

Washington Post, October 31, 2006, p. B8.