Merle Eugene Curti was born on September 15, 1897, at Pohlman, Nebraska. He graduated from high school in Omaha and received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) and Master of Arts (M.A.) from Harvard University, where he came under the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner and Arthur Schlesinger Sr. Before continuing for the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Curti taught at Beloit College and Simmons College (1921-1923). He then returned to Harvard for a year before spending a year at the Sorbonne (1924-1925). In 1925 he married Margaret Wooster; they later had two daughters, Nancy Alice and Mary Margaret. His wife Margaret died in 1961 and Dr. Curti married Frances Bennett Becker in 1967.
In 1927, Curti became the first student to receive a Ph.D. under Arthur Schlesinger Sr. at Harvard. Another strong influence on Curti's thought was Charles A. Beard, whose friendship with Curti is clearly delineated by the correspondence in this collection. After receiving his Ph.D., Curti taught at Smith College from 1927 to 1937, where he ultimately became Dwight Morrow Professor of History. In 1937 he moved to Columbia Teachers' College, where he taught until becoming a history professor at the University of Wisconsin in 1942. From 1947 until his retirement in 1967, Curti was Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. Among his more prominent students were Richard Hofstadter, Jack Wilson, and John Higham. In addition to fulfilling his regular teaching duties, Curti also was a visiting professor or lecturer at many universities in the United States and abroad, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Curti actively participated in the many professional societies to which he belonged. He was president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association from 1951 to 1952, and of the American Historical Association from 1953 to 1954. From 1937 to 1958, he was president of the Wisconsin chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and, from 1958 to 1959, vice-chairman of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Dr. Curti is widely known for his publications. His special interest was always American intellectual history, although he also produced pioneering works in social and economic history. In the former category are his thesis and his first books, which dealt chiefly with the American pacifist movement. Early books include The American Peace Crusade (1929), Bryan and World Peace (1931), The Social Ideas of American Educators (1935), and The Learned Blacksmith: Letters and Journals of Elihu Burritt (1937). In 1943 his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Growth of American Thought, was published. Until 1950 Curti was mostly occupied with writing textbooks, which included Introduction to America (1944), Roots of American Loyalty (1946), America's History (1950), American Issues (1950), and An American History (1950). In this period he also showed his growing interest in American foreign policy by publishing Austria and the U.S., 1848-1852 in 1947. This interest became more evident in his later publications, American Scholarship in the Twentieth Century (1953), Prelude to Point Four (1954), Probing Our Past (1955), The American Paradox (1956), The Rise of the American Nation (1960), and American Philanthropy Overseas: A History (1962), which was a product of a Ford Foundation financed project. One of Curti's most important contributions was his study of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, The Making of an American Community (1959), which pioneered the use of statistical information in the writing of local history. For this work, he received an award for distinguished scholarship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1960. Among other honors which Curti received were honorary degrees, and the Royal Order of the North Star, awarded to him by the King of Sweden in 1965 for furthering American Studies at the University of Uppsala. He died on March 9, 1996, at the age of ninety-eight.
Appendix 1 is a list of Dr. Curti's Wisconsin Ph.D. students as of 1967.
