Page Smith
Page Smith was an influential American historian born on September 6, 1917, in Baltimore, Maryland. He initially pursued English at Dartmouth College, achieving high academic honors before serving in World War II, where he sustained injuries in Italy. After the war, Smith shifted his focus to history, earning both his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, specializing in colonial American history. His notable works include a biography of James Wilson and a two-volume biography of John Adams, the latter receiving several prestigious awards. Smith also served as the first provost of Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but resigned in protest over academic tenure policies. His most significant contribution was the seven-volume series "The People's History of the United States," which garnered acclaim for its engaging narrative style and broad historical perspective. Smith’s work often reflected his commitment to social issues and the complexities of American history, and he passed away on August 28, 1995, in Santa Cruz.
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Subject Terms
Page Smith
- Born: September 6, 1917
- Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
- Died: August 28, 1995
- Place of death: Santa Cruz, California
Biography
Historian Page Smith was born on September 6, 1917, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of William Ward Smith and Ellen Page. He graduated from Gilman School, a preparatory school, and entered Dartmouth College as an English major. He earned top grades in all of his courses, was named a Rufus Choate Scholar, and graduated with a B.A. in 1940.
The following year, when the United States began its military involvement in World War II, Smith began a five-year stint in the army. Both of his legs were wounded by a land mine while he commanded a mountain rifle company in Italy. After the war, he applied to Harvard University to pursue a graduate degree in history. His decision to switch fields can be attributed to his admiration for Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a professor of social philosophy with whom he had studied at Dartmouth. Smith specialized in colonial American history at Harvard, where he received his M.A. in 1948 and his Ph.D. in 1951.
Smith spent two years as a research assistant at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia, and in 1953 he began a ten-year career at the University of California, Los Angeles. Smith reworked his dissertation and published his first book, James Wilson: Founding Father, in 1956. A two-volume biography of John Adams followed in 1962, the culmination of five years of research. The book received the Kenneth Roberts Memorial Award from Doubleday Press and the Bancroft Award in American History from Columbia University. It also was nominated for a National Book Award and was a Book-of- the-Month Club selection.
In 1964, Smith became the first provost of the University of California’s Cowell College in Santa Cruz, a position he held until 1970, when he returned to teaching. Three years after he returned to teaching, he resigned in protest when a junior faculty member was denied tenure because he had focused on teaching rather than publishing books and papers related to his research. Smith would examine this academic trend twenty years later in Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, published in 1991. John Chalberg’s review in College Teaching described the book as “half … a history of American higher education since the Civil War and half a curmudgeonly commentary.”
Between 1976 and 1987, Smith published what became his singular achievement: the seven volumes that made up the People’s History of the United States. Reviewers favorably compared the series to such monumental multivolume works as Henry Adams’s history of the United States. The work reflects Smith’s ability to recount a broad, sweeping view of history and to hold readers’ interest with telling details. Smith’s former dissertation advisor, Samuel Eliot Morison, reviewed the first volume and pronounced the account of the Battle of Bunker Hill “a real thriller.”
Smith applied similar methods of research and writing to Democracy on Trial: The Japanese-American Evaluation and Relocation in World War II. Reviewer Alexander Cox, writing in Military Review, praised the book for its “fresh perspective” grounded in archival research and interviews with survivors and presented in a way that “reads like a novel.” Ken Masugi, in a review in National Review, acknowledged that Smith’s work shattered stereotypes, but ultimately characterized the book as unsatisfactory because of its reliance on the memories of interviewees and its dearth of footnotes. Smith died in Santa Cruz on August 28, 1995.