M & D DeepDuck Read. On Carl Becker

[Mark Kohut]

Carl Becker was a famous Cornell historian with other seminal books,
including one on the ideas embodied in the Declaration of
Independence, in the every near future of Mason & Dixon's time.
"Becker studied under Frederick Jackson Turner, who became his
doctoral adviser there.[1] Becker got his Ph.D. in 1907. He was John
Wendell Anderson Professor of History in the Department of History at
Cornell University from 1917 to 1941. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1923.[2]

Becker died in Ithaca, New York.

Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its
five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.

Here is something from wikipedia on Becker's work: He is best known
for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932),
four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His
assertion--that philosophies in the "Age of Reason" relied far more
upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit--has been
influential, but has also been much attacked, notably by Peter Gay.
Interest in the book is partly explained by this passage (p. 47):

In the thirteenth century the key words would no doubt be God, sin,
grace, salvation, heaven and the like; in the nineteenth century,
matter, fact, matter-of-fact, evolution, progress; in the twentieth
century, relativity, process, adjustment, function, complex. In the
eighteenth century the words without which no enlightened person could
reach a restful conclusion were nature, natural law, first cause,
reason, sentiment, humanity, perfectibility [...].

This isolation of vocabularies of the epoch chimes with much later
work, even if the rest of the book is essayistic in approach. Johnson
Kent Wright writes

Becker wrote as a principled liberal [...]. Yet in some respects The
Heavenly City presents an almost uncanny anticipation of the
"postmodern" reading of the eighteenth century.

--"The Pre-Postmodernism of Carl Becker", p. 162, in Postmodernism and
the Enlightenment (2001), Daniel Gordon editor


Becker quotes: "History is the memory of things said and done."

"The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it."

"Freedom and responsibility." This saying, from a 1943 lecture, has
been frequently misquoted.[3] When Cornell memorialized Becker by
naming a residential college in his honor, the university commissioned
a large stone placard to be affixed to the building's entryway reading
"FREEDOM WITH RESPONSIBILITY".[3]

he began challenging the then-orthodox assumption of the superiority
of a scientific methodology in historical study. He maintained that
perceived "facts" are basically mental images created by the
historian's experience and a larger, socially defined reality that
determines the process by which the historian selects his data.
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