Notable Historians, Posters & Prints “B...-”
educational posters for social studies classrooms, home schools, and theme decor for office.

Jacques Barzun
Charles A. Beard
The Venerable Bede
Morris Berman

Albert J. Beveridge
Hiram Bingham
Arna Bontemps
Daniel Boorstin

Jacques Barzun
b. 11-30-1907; Creteil, France
d. 10-25-2012; San Antonio, Texas

Jacques Barzun, at age 12, was sent by his father to the U.S. for a broad liberal education. Barzun became a professor of history and founded the discipline of “cultural history”.

Jacques Barzun quotes ~
• “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”
• “A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.”
• “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”
• “Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.”
• “If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.”

• From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present, Jacque Barzun

Charles Austin Beard
b. 11-27-1874; Knightstown, Indiana
d. 9-1-1948; New Haven, CT

Charles A. Beard wrote numerous text books making him one of the most influential historians of the early 20th century. He radically re-evalued the founding fathers of the United States, believing they were motivated by economics than philosophical principles. Beard was one of the cofounders of the New School for Social Research in New York.

Beard's wife, Mary Ritter Beard, researched feminism and labor history, producing Woman as a Force in History in 1946. Together they collaborated on projects, most notably The Beard's Basic History of the United States.

Charles Austin Beard ~
• “You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in their struggle for independence.”

Saint Bede the Venerable
b. ca. 672 or 673; England
d. 5-27-735

Bede was a Benedictine monk at a Northumbrian monastery. He is best known as an author and scholar, and his most famous work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) gained him the title “The father of English history”.

Morris Berman
b. 1944; Rochester, NY

Academic and culture critic Morris Berman specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history. His books are written for a general audience.

Albert J. Beveridge
b. 10-6-1862; Highland Co., Indiana
d. 4-27-1927; Indianapolis

Albert J. Beveridge was a Pulitizer Prize winning historian for his four volume biography of Founding Father and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall. As a U.S. Senator from Indiana (1899-1911) he was the champion of reform movements such as child labor legislation and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 that was prompted by the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Hiram Bingham
b. 11-19-1875; Honolulu, Hawaii
d. 6-6-1956; Washington, DC

History professor, and later U.S. Senator, Hiram Bingham is credited with making Machu Picchu, Peru, known to the larger public in 1911.

• Lost Cities of the Incas

Arna Bontemps
b. 10-13-1902; Alexandria, LA
d. 6-4-1973 (heart attack)

Arna Bontemps, a poet and teacher, was a part of the Harlem Renaissance. He became the librarian at Fisk University and established African-American literature and culture as a goal of scholarly study by preserving and archiving the works of African-Americans.

• Black Thunder: Gabriel's Revolt: Virginia, 1800

Daniel Boorstin
b. 10-1-1914; Atlanta, GA
d. 2-28-2004; Washington, DC

Historian and professor Daniel Boorstin's trilogy of The Discoverers, The Creators and The Seekers survey the scientific, artistic and philosophic histories of humanity. He was also the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress.

William Wells Brown: A Reader (no commerically avaiable poster)

William Wells Brown
b. 11-6-1816; Lexington, KY
d. 11-6-1884; Chelsea, MA

Escaped slave William Wells Brown rose to prominence as an abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Brown, a pioneer in several literary genres that includied travel writing, fiction, and drama. His first novel was Clotel, or The President's Daughter.

He was an almost exact contemporary of Frederick Douglass, with whom he feuded publicly.

William Wells Brown quotes ~
• “The duty I owe to the slave, to truth, and to God, demands that I should use my pen and tongue so long as life and health are vouchsafed to me to employ them, or until the last chain shall fall from the limbs of the last slave in America and the world.”
• “The last struggle for our rights, the battle for our civilization, is entirely with ourselves.”
• “People don't follow titles, they follow courage.”
• “All I demand for the black man is, that the white people shall take their heels off his neck, and let him have a chance to rise by his own efforts.”

Henry Thomas Buckle - History of Civilization in England (no commerically avaiable poster)

Henry Thomas Buckle
b. 11-24-1821; Lee, Kent, England
d. 5-29-1862; Damascus, Syria

English historian Henry Thomas Buckle is “remembered for treating history as an exact science, which is why many of his ideas have passed into the common literary stock, and have been more precisely elaborated by later writers on sociology and history because of his careful scientific analyses.”

Henry Thomas Buckle quotes ~
• “Men are made uneasy; they flinch; they cannot bear the sudden light; a general restlessness supervenes; the face of society is disturbed, or perhaps convulsed; old interests and old beliefs have been destroyed before new ones have been created. These symptoms are the precursors of revolution; they have preceded all the great changes through which the world has passed.”
• “In 1776, the Americans laid before Europe that noble Declaration, which ought to be hung up in the nursery of every king, and blazoned on the porch of every royal palace.”
• “Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.”

Jacob Burckhardt
b. 5-25-1818; Basel, Switzerland
d. 8-8-1897; Basel

Jacob Burckhardt, a historian of art and culture, was described as “the great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance”. He first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well.

Jacob Burckhardt quotes ~
• “History is still in large measure poetry to me.”
• “History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.”
• “The people no longer believe in principles, but will probably periodically believe in saviours.”
• “It seems that an essential condition for crises is to be found in the existence of a highly developed system of communications and the spreading of a homogenous mentality over vast areas.”
• “In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.”
• “Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future.”