Mark Kishlansky (October 11, 1948 – May 19, 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University.[1]
Kishlansky was born in Brooklyn. He completed his undergraduate degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1970. He proceeded to graduate study under David Underdown at Brown University, receiving his M.A. in 1972 and his PhD in 1977. His PhD thesis was titled "The Emergence of Radical Politics in the English Revolution".[2] From 1975 to 1991 he taught at the University of Chicago, successively as instructor and professor. From 1990 to 1991 he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought. He was a visiting professor at Northwestern University in 1983 and was the Mellon Visiting Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology in 1990–91. In 1991 he became a professor at Harvard University[3] and from 1998 to 2001 served as Associate Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He was editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991 and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.
Along with Kevin Sharpe, Conrad Russell and John Morrill, Kishlansky pioneered the revisionist interpretation of early Stuart history.[4] Unlike previous scholars who had seen the Civil Wars of the 1640s as stemming from the growth of ideological opposition to the Stuart monarchs over the previous half-century, the revisionists argued that an ideological consensus had prevailed at least until the early 1620s. This consensus, in their view, was unsettled in the late 1620s and afterwards by religious disputes and by the crown's fiscal problems. The revisionist school sought to counter interpretations of the English Civil Wars that had been advanced by historians influenced by Marxist and Whiggish models of historical development. Kishlansky advanced his interpretation in an article in 1977 in The Journal of Modern History[5] and in two books, The Rise of the New Model Army (1979) and Parliamentary Selection (1986).
In the early 1990s Kishlansky became involved in a controversy with the University of Cambridge historian, John Adamson. The controversy began in 1990 when Kishlansky published an article in the Historical Journal criticising Adamson's use of sources. Kishlansky, contending that Adamson had overstated the influence of Viscount Saye and Sele in the parliamentary politics of the mid-1640s and had misrepresented the original sources he had analysed, entitled his article "Saye What?"[6] Adamson responded with an article entitled "Politics and the Nobility in Civil-War England"[7] exposing Kishlansky's own archival source problems and Kishlansky responded reiterating his case with an article titled "Saye No More".[8] This was followed by an exchange of letters in the Times Literary Supplement in 1992, provoked by a review written by Lawrence Stone that mentioned the controversy. A series of historians commented on the debate in the letters pages of the TLS, including Conrad Russell, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Kishlansky and Adamson. This was covered in the British press, with The Times describing it as a "fierce high table row"[9] and The Independent calling it a "most uncivil war".[10] The Sunday Times described it as a "historians' brawl" that had "shocked the academic community".[11]
In addition to his publications on Stuart history, Kishlansky co-authored a number of textbooks, most notably Civilization in the West (with Patrick Geary and Patricia O'Brien), Societies and Cultures in World History (with Patrick Geary, Patricia O'Brien and R. Bin Wong), and The Unfinished Legacy (with Patrick Geary and Patricia O'Brien). He was a consulting editor for Prentice-Hall and served as a consulting editor for Longman Publications (2006–08), HarperCollins (1990–96), Scott, Foresman Co. (1987–89) and George Allen & Unwin (1984–86).
Kishlansky died on May 19, 2015, at age 66.[12]
Kishlansky was a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Royal Historical Society. He held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1983–84 and the Newberry Library in 1987–88. He received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1989.[13] He held the Fletcher Jones Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library in 1990. He held the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship for 1995–96.[14]
