Staloff, Darren 1961–

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Staloff, Darren 1961–

PERSONAL: Born 1961. Education: Columbia College, B.A.; Columbia University, M.A., M.Phil, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—City College of New York, Department of History, 138th St. & Convent Ave., New York, NY 10031. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator, historian, and writer. City College of New York and Graduate Center of the City University of New York, associate professor of history. Postdoctoral fellow at Institute for Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA.

WRITINGS:

The Search for a Meaningful Past (recorded lectures), Teaching Company (Springfield, VA), 1995.

(With others) The History of the United States (recorded lectures), Teaching Company (Springfield, VA), 1996.

(With Michael Sugrue) Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, (recorded lectures), Teaching Company (Springfield, VA), 1996.

The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Darren Staloff is an expert in early American history. In his book The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts, Staloff discusses the growth and eventual waning of Protestant Christianity as a dominant value base in Massachusetts intellectual circles and politics. "Staloff is particularly perceptive in detailing the institutional policies that ministers and magistrates gradually devised to buttress each other's authority despite the inevitable friction between them," wrote John P. McWilliams in Early American Literature. The reviewer went on to call the book an "incisive study."

In Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding, Staloff discusses the founding principles of America through three of the country's founding father's and the different ways in which they were influenced by the European Enlightenment and by their regional cultures and beliefs. The author outlines Hamilton's pragmatic approach to industrialization and central government, Adams's devotion to scientific progress as the foundation of liberty, and Jefferson's more idealistic approach to politics and building America. "Intended to be suggestive rather than conclusive, Staloff's is another … contribution to the growing literature on America's original greatest generation," wrote Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr., in Library Journal. The reviewer also noted that the author relies primarily on critiques of the three men's written works as opposed to other books and writings about them. A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that the work contains "a lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great revolutionaries."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 2001, J. William and T. Youngs, review of The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts, p. 159.

Choice, June, 1998, B.R. Burg, review of The Making of an American Thinking Class, p. 1773.

Early American Literature, winter, 2000, John P. McWilliams, review of The Making of an American Thinking Class, p. 89.

Journal of American History, March, 1999, Jane Kamensky, review of The Making of an American Thinking Class, p. 1574.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2005, review of Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding, p. 530.

Library Journal, May 15, 2005, Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr., review of Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, p. 127.

New England Quarterly, June, 1999, Rachelle E. Friedman, review of The Making of an American Thinking Class, p. 315.

Publishers Weekly, May 9, 2005, review of Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, p. 56.

Reviews in American History, December, 1998, Philip F. Gura, review of The Making of an American Thinking Class, p. 644.