James Harvey Robinson

Born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1863, James Harvey Robinson studied at Harvard before earning a Ph.D. at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Columbia University, where he became known as an influential teacher of European and intellectual history.

Robinson is best remembered as one of the leading voices behind the "New History," an approach that argued history should draw on fields like sociology, psychology, and anthropology and help people understand the problems of their own time. His book The New History helped define that movement, and his broader, more practical view of the past had a lasting effect on how history was taught.

In 1919, he left Columbia and took part in founding the New School for Social Research in New York. He also reached a wide general audience through books such as The Mind in the Making, bringing scholarly ideas to readers in a clear, accessible way until his death in 1936.