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Richard R. Stenberg

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Richard R. Stenberg (b. c. 1910) was an American historian. During the 1930s and early 1940s he wrote several influential papers on the U.S. politics and events of the second quarter of the 19th century, sometimes known as the Jacksonian era. He also worked as regional administrator of Federal One's Historical Records Survey. He then largely disappeared from the public record himself, apparently having been confined to a hospital in Washington, D.C.

Life and work

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Stenberg was born around 1910 in Nebraska. He did his doctorate at the University of Texas.[1] In 1934 he was hired to teach European history at the University of Arkansas.[2][1] He was a regional director, based in San Antonio, of the New Deal-era Historical Records Survey, serving from inception until August 1936.[3][4] At the time of his son's birth in 1937, he reported to the registrar that he had worked as a teacher at the University of Texas for the past four years.[5]

Stenberg is remembered for consistently attacking what was then consensus view of history—represented in his time by figures including John S. Bassett and Eugene Barker—and he "particularly assaulted the reputations of Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Sam Houston." As part of Stenberg's "debunking" set-the-record-straight style, he was in the habit of "ignoring any other possible interpretation of his evidence, unless he use[d] it to show how wrong it was."[6] In 1958, Charles G. Sellers described him "Jackson's most inveterate scholarly foe in the twentieth century."[7] Stenberg intended to produce a book called The Insidious Andrew Jackson, which was never published, but nonetheless "Stenberg's point of view gained some currency through a series of articles."[7] Jackson's research on the relationship between Sam Houston and Jackson and American expansionism into Texas was considered almost transgressive to some in the 1930s but by the 1970s the work was deemed "brilliant" and "endlessly cited."[8] Edward Pessen both recommended Stenberg's Jackson-critical articles and called them "studies in vitriol."[9] Donald Ratliffe wrote in his 2015 history of the 1824 U.S. presidential election that "One does not have to accept Richard R. Stenberg's character assassination of Jackson in his 'Jackson, Buchanan, and the Corrupt Bargain Calumny'...to appreciate his demonstration of the thinness of the evidence for the 'bargain and corruption' charge."[10]

Stenberg was an inmate of St. Elizabeth's Asylum in Washington, D.C. at the time of the 1950 U.S. census.[11]

Selected publications

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b "Historical News and Comments". The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 21 (1): 133–144. 1934. ISSN 0161-391X. JSTOR 1896457.
  2. ^ "Texan Selected for Arkansas U. Post". Fort Worth Star-Telegram. 1934-01-14. p. 29. Retrieved 2025-03-06.
  3. ^ "Reed Heads Archives Project". El Paso Times. 1936-04-25. p. 12. Retrieved 2025-03-06.
  4. ^ Historical Records Survey (U.S.) (1939). Inventory of Federal Archives in the States: The Department of the treasury. Historical Records Survey.
  5. ^ "Stenberg". Indiana (U.S.) Birth Certificates, 1907–1944. Ancestry.com. (subscription required)
  6. ^ Odom (1970), p. 942–943.
  7. ^ a b Sellers (1958), p. 623 n. 18.
  8. ^ "Houston's Wife by Haver Currie". The Austin American. 1971-08-22. p. 99. Retrieved 2025-03-06.
  9. ^ Pessen, Edward (1985) [1969]. Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Rev. ed.). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 362. ISBN 978-0-252-01237-2. LCCN 85001100. OCLC 11783430.
  10. ^ Ratcliffe, Donald (2021). The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824's Five-Horse Race. University Press of Kansas. p. 335. ISBN 978-0-7006-3247-3.
  11. ^ "Entry for Edwin Statkus and Catherine Stecker, 3 April 1950". United States, Census, 1950. FamilySearch.

Sources

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