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Peter Gay
 
 
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Peter Gay (born June 20, 1923), is a Jew
Jew

A Jew is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnoreligious group that traces its ancestry to the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East....
ish American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 historian of the social history
Social history

Social history is an area of history study, considered by some to be a social science, that attempts to view historical evidence from the point of view of developing social trends....
 of ideas, born as Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin
Berlin

Berlin is the Capital of Germany city and one of sixteen States of Germany of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is the country's largest city....
, where he was educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium
Gymnasium (school)

A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English Grammar schools in the United Kingdoms or sixth form colleges and U.S....
. After witnessing Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht

File:1938 Interior of Berlin synagogue after Kristallnacht.jpgKristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass or "night of shattered crystal" was a pogrom in Nazi Germany on November 9?10, 1938....
 in 1938, he fled Nazi Germany in 1939. His family initially booked passage on the SS St. Louis
SS St. Louis

SS St. Louis was a Germany ocean liner built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for the Hamburg America Line. Even though she did not have a steam engine, inaccurate usage of the SS prefix in referring to St....
 (whose passengers were eventually denied visas) but fortuitously changed their booking to an earlier voyage to Cuba. He came to the United States in 1941 and took American citizenship in 1946 where he changed his name from Fröhlich (German for "happy") to Gay.






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Peter Gay (born June 20, 1923), is a Jew
Jew

A Jew is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnoreligious group that traces its ancestry to the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East....
ish American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 historian of the social history
Social history

Social history is an area of history study, considered by some to be a social science, that attempts to view historical evidence from the point of view of developing social trends....
 of ideas, born as Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin
Berlin

Berlin is the Capital of Germany city and one of sixteen States of Germany of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is the country's largest city....
, where he was educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium
Gymnasium (school)

A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English Grammar schools in the United Kingdoms or sixth form colleges and U.S....
. After witnessing Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht

File:1938 Interior of Berlin synagogue after Kristallnacht.jpgKristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass or "night of shattered crystal" was a pogrom in Nazi Germany on November 9?10, 1938....
 in 1938, he fled Nazi Germany in 1939. His family initially booked passage on the SS St. Louis
SS St. Louis

SS St. Louis was a Germany ocean liner built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for the Hamburg America Line. Even though she did not have a steam engine, inaccurate usage of the SS prefix in referring to St....
 (whose passengers were eventually denied visas) but fortuitously changed their booking to an earlier voyage to Cuba. He came to the United States in 1941 and took American citizenship in 1946 where he changed his name from Fröhlich (German for "happy") to Gay. Gay received his education at the University of Denver
University of Denver

The University of Denver , founded in 1864 is the oldest private university university in the Rocky Mountain Region of the United States. The University of Denver is a coeducational, four-year university in Denver, Colorado, Colorado....
, where he was awarded a BA in 1946 and at Columbia University where he was awarded an MA in 1947 and PhD in 1951. Gay worked as political science professor at Columbia
Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York , is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights, Manhattan neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City....
 between 1948-1955 and as history professor from 1955-1969. He taught at Yale
Yale University

Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher education in the United States and is a member of the Ivy League....
 from 1969 until his retirement in 1993. He married Ruth Slotkin (died 2006) in 1959 and has three stepchildren.

Gay's first interest was in intellectual history
Intellectual history

Intellectual history refers to the history of the people who create, discuss, write about and in other ways propagate ideas. Although the field emerged from European discourses of Kulturgeschichte and Geistesgeschichte, the historical study of ideas has engaged not only western intellectual traditions, but others as well including, but no...
. His 1959 book, Voltaire's Politics examined Voltaire
Voltaire

Fran?ois-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Age of Enlightenment writer, essayist, and philosophy known for his wit, philosophical sport, and defense of civil liberty, including freedom of religion and free trade....
 as a politician and how his politics influenced the ideas that Voltaire championed in his writings. Gay followed the success of Voltaire's Politics with a wider history of the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment or The Enlightenment is a term used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century, in which rationalism was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority....
, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1969), for which he was honored with the National Book Award
National Book Award

The National Book Awards are among the most eminent literary prizes in the United States. Started in 1950, the awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the prior year, as well as lifetime achievement awards including the "Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters" and the "Literarian Award"....
 in 1967 and the Mecher Book Prize. Gay's 1968 book, Weimar Culture was considered at the time to be a ground-breaking cultural history
Cultural history

The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular culture traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience....
 of the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic was the democracy and republican period of Germany from 1919 to 1933. Following World War I, the republic emerged from the German Revolution in November 1918....
. Starting in 1978 with Freud, Jews and Other Germans, an examination of the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture, Gay has become increasingly interested in psychology. Many of his works focus on the social impact of psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and his followers, which is devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behaviour....
. Gay is a leading champion of Psychohistory
Psychohistory

Psychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present....
 and an admirer of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalysis of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of Psychological repression and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for curing psychopathology through dialogue...
.

Awards

  • AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction.
  • Jewish Distinction Award
  • Civil Rights Awareness Award (Presented by the NAACP)
  • Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
    Geschwister-Scholl-Preis

    The Geschwister-Scholl-Preis is a literary prize which was initiated in 1980 by the State Association of Bavaria in the Stock Market Society of the German Book Trade and the city of Munich....
     (Munich
    Munich

    Munich is the capital city of Bavaria, Germany. Munich is located on the River Isar north of the Northern Limestone Alps. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg....
    , 1999)


Works

  • The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx, 1952.
  • Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist, 1959.
  • The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment, 1964.
  • The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism, 1966.
  • The Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America, 1966.
  • Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, 1968.
  • The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom, 1969.
  • The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment, 1970.
  • Historians at Work, 1972.
  • co-written with R.K. Webb, Modern Europe, 1973.
  • The Enlightenment; A Comprehensive Anthology, 1973.
  • Style in History, 1974.
  • Art and Act: On Causes in History—Manet, Gropius, Mondrian, 1976.
  • Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, 1978.
  • Education of the Senses, 1984.
  • The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud - 5 vols, 1984-1998 (includes The Education of the Senses and The Cultivation of Hatred)
  • Freud for Historians, 1985.
  • The Tender Passion, 1986.
  • A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, 1987.
  • Freud: A Life for Our Time, 1988.
  • "The German-Jewish Legacy-and I: Some Personal Reflections" pages 203-210 from American Jewish Archives, Volume 40, 1988.
  • Editor A Freud Reader, 1989.
  • Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments, 1990.
  • Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, 1993.
  • The Cultivation of Hatred, 1993.
  • The Naked Heart, 1995.
  • The Enlightenment and the Rise of Modern Paganism revised edition, 1995.
  • Pleasure Wars, 1998.
  • My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, 1998 (autobiography).
  • Mozart, 1999.
  • Schnitzler's Century, 2002.
  • Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, 2007.