Early Life and Education
Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City. His parents' leftism was deeply influential. He attended John Adams High School and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1948. During his teens and his college years, Gutman became involved in numerous left-wing causes, flirted with communism, and worked for the Wallace presidential campaign.
He received a master's degree in history from Columbia University. His thesis studied the Panic of 1873 and its effects on New York City, and focused heavily on workers' demands for public works. It was written under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. Gutman later dismissed it as "boring conventional labor history."
Gutman was awarded a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1959. His doctoral dissertation was on American labor during the Panic of 1873 and supervised by Howard K. Beale. During this time, Gutman worked with the eminent labor scholars Merrill Jensen, Merle Curti and Selig Perlman, who had turned the University of Wisconsin–Madison into the cradle of modern American labor studies.
He later married Judith Mara, and they had two daughters.
Read more about this topic: Herbert Gutman
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top—or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things.... Life is one crisis after another.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“Tell my son how anxious I am that he may read and learn his Book, that he may become the possessor of those things that a grateful country has bestowed upon his papa—Tell him that his happiness through life depends upon his procuring an education now; and with it, to imbibe proper moral habits that can entitle him to the possession of them.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)