SIVACRACY.NET

BERKELEY – Lawrence W. Levine, a highly influential history professor for more than three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, died on Monday (Oct. 23) of cancer at his home in Berkeley. He was 73.

Through his writings and teaching, colleagues said, Levine helped transform cultural history in the United States into a vibrant and accessible field of study. A champion of multiculturalism, Levine won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship in 1983 for his intellectual curiosity and scholarship.

In "Black Culture and Black Consciousness" (1977), Levine's best known work, he made use of the oral expressive tradition of African Americans to examine how they perceived themselves, their position in American society, and their relations with whites.

According to UC Berkeley history professors Leon Litwack and Waldo Martin, the book was a pathbreaking study of folk thought and culture that exerted an extraordinary influence on several generations of scholars - not only historians, but anthropologists, folklorists, musicologists, sociologists, and students of American and African American culture.

Historian Shane White, a professor in Australia at the University of Sydney, where Levine once taught as a visiting professor, added that Levine was "one of the best historians writing in the second half of the 20th century. His pioneering explorations of the American past made possible the current explosion in the popularity of cultural history."

Levine's 1988 book "Highbrow/Lowbrow" and the 1993 book "The Unpredictable Past" demonstrated not only the varieties of historical consciousness and documentation, but the interplay of American thought and behavior in folk and popular culture. And "The Opening of the American Mind," a 1996 book, was a spirited defense of multiculturalism and a powerful critique of conservative critics of modern American culture. ...