Theodore K. Rabb (March 5, 1937–January 7, 2019) was an American historian specializing in the early modern period of European history. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Princeton University. He was one of the leading scholars in the field of 16th- and 17th-century Europe, focusing on varying topics such as climate history and food history.
Rabb was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia. He was raised in London. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford (B.A., 1958; M.A., 1962) and at Princeton University (M.A., 1960; Ph.D., 1961). His Ph.D. advisers were Elmore Harris Harbison and Frank Craven. Rabb was a professor of history at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University before becoming an Associate Professor at Princeton University in 1967.
He was a member of the Princeton faculty since 1967, teaching in both the History Department and in Humanistic Studies, an interdisciplinary program. He also directed Princeton’s Community College programs.
In 1970, he co-founded the Journal of Interdisciplinary History with Robert I. Rotberg. He was also an advisor for the 1993 television series Renaissance. He has chaired the National Council for History Education and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
Theodore Rabinowicz was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia, to Oskar and Rose (Oliner) Rabinowicz. His father was an author and professor, and in 1939 the family emigrated, settling in London.
Theodore received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Queen’s College, Oxford, then furthered his education in 1958 at Princeton, studying European and colonial American history and receiving a Ph.D. in 1961.
He taught at Stanford, Northwestern and Harvard before returning to Princeton to join the faculty in 1967. He took emeritus status there in 2006.
At Princeton, in the 1990s, he and colleagues developed a demanding four-course humanities sequence that was an academic high point for the students who took it. It reflected his longstanding interest in cross-disciplinary explorations. He had been one of the founding editors, in 1970, of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, which he continued to edit.
Professor Rabb also ran an internship program that enabled Princeton students to begin their teaching careers at community colleges in the area.
“He was extremely active in trying to improve the status of teaching, the teaching of history,” Mr. McCullough said, citing Professor Rabb’s work with the National Council for History Education, where for a time he was chairman.
In addition to his books, Professor Rabb wrote scholarly articles, book reviews and more for a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review.
Other books, like “Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age” (1993) and “The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity” (2006), explored his area of specialty, which television viewers also got to experience in 1993 when PBS broadcast “Renaissance,” a five-part series that he helped create and for which he provided on-camera commentary.
A World Reborn 1 of 9CreditCreditVideo by pswiebe
Professor Rabb’s intellectual curiosity, however, took him far and wide.
His “The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters” (2011) examined thousands of years of art, beginning with ancient stone reliefs, to discuss how the depiction of warfare has changed and why. His most recent book, published last year, was “Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts.”
“The reach of his mind was phenomenal,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, said in a telephone interview, noting that he had been reading the “Michelangelo” book recently.
“I’d written in the margin about a third of this way through, ‘This book reminds me of how much I don’t know,’ ” he said.
Dr. Theodore K. Rabb was a leading historian of European History and the Renaissance who taught that the values of Western culture are an invaluable fountainhead of modern life. During an era in which scholars developed increasingly specialized interests, he adopted a sweeping academic approach—ranging from economic history to politics to painting and emphasizing the broad scope and lasting influence of ideas that flowered during the Renaissance. At Princeton University, where he taught for almost 40 years, Dr. Rabb spearheaded a popular and demanding four-course interdisciplinary humanities sequence that blended history, literature, and philosophy.
His books include The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975), in which he suggested that the artistic and scientific efflorescence of the Renaissance transformed a world of constant turmoil into one of relative tranquility. In later years, Dr. Rabb focused on cultural studies, publishing The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters in 2011 and Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts last year.
his works included:
The Thirty Years' War: Problems of Motive, Extent, and Effect (Boston, 1964)
Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)
The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)
Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Emergence of International Business 1200-1800, Volume III: Enterprise and Empire (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999)
The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
With Robert I. Rotberg, Rabb wrote:
The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
Industrialization and Urbanization: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
The New History, the 1980s and Beyond: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)
Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
with Ezra Suleiman, Rabb Wrote:
The Making and Unmaking of Democracy: Lessons from History and World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002)
Journal articles
In the Journal of Interdisciplinary History
'The Historian and the Climatologist', 10 (1980): 831-837
'Coherence, Synthesis, and Quality in History', 12 (1981): 315-332
'The Development of Quantification in Historical Research', 13 (1983): 591-601
'The Interdisciplinary Nature of American History', 16 (1985): 103-106
'The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History', 17 (1986): 1-6
'History and Religion: Interpretation and Illumination', 23 (1993): 445-451
'The Historian and Art: A New Maturity', 33 (2002): 87-93
'How Italian Was the Renaissance?', 33 (2003): 569-575
'Opera, Musicology, and History', 36 (2006): 321-330
Rabb's Review articles included,
'The Historian and the Art Historian', 4 (1973): 107-117
'The Historian and the Art Historian Revisited', 14 (1984): 647-655
'The Historian and the Art Historian, III: Recent Work on the Seventeenth Century', 20 (1990): 437-444
'Historians and Art Historians: A Lowering of Sights?', 27 (1996): 87-94
In Past & Present
'Religion and the Rise of Modern Science', 31 (1965): 111-126
'Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', 33 (1966): 148
'Free Trade and the Gentry in the Parliament of 1604', 40 (1968): 165-173
'The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance: A Comment', 52 (1971): 135-140
'The Role of the Commons', 92 (1981): 55-78
Rabb's Other journals Included:
'The Effects of the Thirty Years' War on the German Economy', The Journal of Modern History, 34 (1962): 40-51
'The Editions of Sir Edwin Sandys's "Relation of the State of Religion"', The Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (1963): 323-336
'Sir Edwin Sandys and the Parliament of 1604', The American Historical Review, 69 (1964): 646-670
'Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 1575-1630', The Economic History Review, 19 (1966): 70-81
'On Nominalism and Idealism, Historical and Statistical: A Response to Roger Schofield', The Historical Journal, 15 (1972): 788-793
'The Expansion of Europe and the Spirit of Capitalism', The Historical Journal, 17 (1974): 675-689
'Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance', English Historical Review, 118 (2003): 1384-1385
'Observations - Why Michelangelo Matters: His spiritual World has Vanished, But the Master's Quest for Perfection is Rightly Irresistible', Commentary, 122 (2006): 56
'Those Who Do Not Learn History...', Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (2007)
Rabb's Review articles Included:
'Parliament and Society in Early Stuart England: The Legacy of Wallace Notestein', The American Historical Review, 77 (1972): 705-714
'Early Modern Europe from Above and Below', The Journal of Modern History, 45 (1973): 456-462
Rabb's Documentery Appearances included:
A & E's Biography of the Millennium: 100 People - 1000 Years (1999)
Rabb was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia. He was raised in London. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford (B.A., 1958; M.A., 1962) and at Princeton University (M.A., 1960; Ph.D., 1961). His Ph.D. advisers were Elmore Harris Harbison and Frank Craven. Rabb was a professor of history at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University before becoming an Associate Professor at Princeton University in 1967.
He was a member of the Princeton faculty since 1967, teaching in both the History Department and in Humanistic Studies, an interdisciplinary program. He also directed Princeton’s Community College programs.
In 1970, he co-founded the Journal of Interdisciplinary History with Robert I. Rotberg. He was also an advisor for the 1993 television series Renaissance. He has chaired the National Council for History Education and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
Theodore Rabinowicz was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia, to Oskar and Rose (Oliner) Rabinowicz. His father was an author and professor, and in 1939 the family emigrated, settling in London.
Theodore received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Queen’s College, Oxford, then furthered his education in 1958 at Princeton, studying European and colonial American history and receiving a Ph.D. in 1961.
He taught at Stanford, Northwestern and Harvard before returning to Princeton to join the faculty in 1967. He took emeritus status there in 2006.
At Princeton, in the 1990s, he and colleagues developed a demanding four-course humanities sequence that was an academic high point for the students who took it. It reflected his longstanding interest in cross-disciplinary explorations. He had been one of the founding editors, in 1970, of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, which he continued to edit.
Professor Rabb also ran an internship program that enabled Princeton students to begin their teaching careers at community colleges in the area.
“He was extremely active in trying to improve the status of teaching, the teaching of history,” Mr. McCullough said, citing Professor Rabb’s work with the National Council for History Education, where for a time he was chairman.
In addition to his books, Professor Rabb wrote scholarly articles, book reviews and more for a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review.
Other books, like “Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age” (1993) and “The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity” (2006), explored his area of specialty, which television viewers also got to experience in 1993 when PBS broadcast “Renaissance,” a five-part series that he helped create and for which he provided on-camera commentary.
A World Reborn 1 of 9CreditCreditVideo by pswiebe
Professor Rabb’s intellectual curiosity, however, took him far and wide.
His “The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters” (2011) examined thousands of years of art, beginning with ancient stone reliefs, to discuss how the depiction of warfare has changed and why. His most recent book, published last year, was “Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts.”
“The reach of his mind was phenomenal,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, said in a telephone interview, noting that he had been reading the “Michelangelo” book recently.
“I’d written in the margin about a third of this way through, ‘This book reminds me of how much I don’t know,’ ” he said.
Dr. Theodore K. Rabb was a leading historian of European History and the Renaissance who taught that the values of Western culture are an invaluable fountainhead of modern life. During an era in which scholars developed increasingly specialized interests, he adopted a sweeping academic approach—ranging from economic history to politics to painting and emphasizing the broad scope and lasting influence of ideas that flowered during the Renaissance. At Princeton University, where he taught for almost 40 years, Dr. Rabb spearheaded a popular and demanding four-course interdisciplinary humanities sequence that blended history, literature, and philosophy.
His books include The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975), in which he suggested that the artistic and scientific efflorescence of the Renaissance transformed a world of constant turmoil into one of relative tranquility. In later years, Dr. Rabb focused on cultural studies, publishing The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters in 2011 and Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts last year.
his works included:
The Thirty Years' War: Problems of Motive, Extent, and Effect (Boston, 1964)
Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)
The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)
Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Emergence of International Business 1200-1800, Volume III: Enterprise and Empire (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999)
The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
With Robert I. Rotberg, Rabb wrote:
The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
Industrialization and Urbanization: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
The New History, the 1980s and Beyond: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)
Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
with Ezra Suleiman, Rabb Wrote:
The Making and Unmaking of Democracy: Lessons from History and World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002)
Journal articles
In the Journal of Interdisciplinary History
'The Historian and the Climatologist', 10 (1980): 831-837
'Coherence, Synthesis, and Quality in History', 12 (1981): 315-332
'The Development of Quantification in Historical Research', 13 (1983): 591-601
'The Interdisciplinary Nature of American History', 16 (1985): 103-106
'The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History', 17 (1986): 1-6
'History and Religion: Interpretation and Illumination', 23 (1993): 445-451
'The Historian and Art: A New Maturity', 33 (2002): 87-93
'How Italian Was the Renaissance?', 33 (2003): 569-575
'Opera, Musicology, and History', 36 (2006): 321-330
Rabb's Review articles included,
'The Historian and the Art Historian', 4 (1973): 107-117
'The Historian and the Art Historian Revisited', 14 (1984): 647-655
'The Historian and the Art Historian, III: Recent Work on the Seventeenth Century', 20 (1990): 437-444
'Historians and Art Historians: A Lowering of Sights?', 27 (1996): 87-94
In Past & Present
'Religion and the Rise of Modern Science', 31 (1965): 111-126
'Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', 33 (1966): 148
'Free Trade and the Gentry in the Parliament of 1604', 40 (1968): 165-173
'The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance: A Comment', 52 (1971): 135-140
'The Role of the Commons', 92 (1981): 55-78
Rabb's Other journals Included:
'The Effects of the Thirty Years' War on the German Economy', The Journal of Modern History, 34 (1962): 40-51
'The Editions of Sir Edwin Sandys's "Relation of the State of Religion"', The Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (1963): 323-336
'Sir Edwin Sandys and the Parliament of 1604', The American Historical Review, 69 (1964): 646-670
'Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 1575-1630', The Economic History Review, 19 (1966): 70-81
'On Nominalism and Idealism, Historical and Statistical: A Response to Roger Schofield', The Historical Journal, 15 (1972): 788-793
'The Expansion of Europe and the Spirit of Capitalism', The Historical Journal, 17 (1974): 675-689
'Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance', English Historical Review, 118 (2003): 1384-1385
'Observations - Why Michelangelo Matters: His spiritual World has Vanished, But the Master's Quest for Perfection is Rightly Irresistible', Commentary, 122 (2006): 56
'Those Who Do Not Learn History...', Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (2007)
Rabb's Review articles Included:
'Parliament and Society in Early Stuart England: The Legacy of Wallace Notestein', The American Historical Review, 77 (1972): 705-714
'Early Modern Europe from Above and Below', The Journal of Modern History, 45 (1973): 456-462
Rabb's Documentery Appearances included:
A & E's Biography of the Millennium: 100 People - 1000 Years (1999)
Theodore K. Rabb (March 5, 1937–January 7, 2019) was an American historian specializing in the early modern period of European history. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Princeton University. He was one of the leading scholars in the field of 16th- and 17th-century Europe, focusing on varying topics such as climate history and food history.
Rabb was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia. He was raised in London. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford (B.A., 1958; M.A., 1962) and at Princeton University (M.A., 1960; Ph.D., 1961). His Ph.D. advisers were Elmore Harris Harbison and Frank Craven. Rabb was a professor of history at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University before becoming an Associate Professor at Princeton University in 1967.
He was a member of the Princeton faculty since 1967, teaching in both the History Department and in Humanistic Studies, an interdisciplinary program. He also directed Princeton’s Community College programs.
In 1970, he co-founded the Journal of Interdisciplinary History with Robert I. Rotberg. He was also an advisor for the 1993 television series Renaissance. He has chaired the National Council for History Education and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
Theodore Rabinowicz was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia, to Oskar and Rose (Oliner) Rabinowicz. His father was an author and professor, and in 1939 the family emigrated, settling in London.
Theodore received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Queen’s College, Oxford, then furthered his education in 1958 at Princeton, studying European and colonial American history and receiving a Ph.D. in 1961.
He taught at Stanford, Northwestern and Harvard before returning to Princeton to join the faculty in 1967. He took emeritus status there in 2006.
At Princeton, in the 1990s, he and colleagues developed a demanding four-course humanities sequence that was an academic high point for the students who took it. It reflected his longstanding interest in cross-disciplinary explorations. He had been one of the founding editors, in 1970, of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, which he continued to edit.
Professor Rabb also ran an internship program that enabled Princeton students to begin their teaching careers at community colleges in the area.
“He was extremely active in trying to improve the status of teaching, the teaching of history,” Mr. McCullough said, citing Professor Rabb’s work with the National Council for History Education, where for a time he was chairman.
In addition to his books, Professor Rabb wrote scholarly articles, book reviews and more for a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review.
Other books, like “Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age” (1993) and “The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity” (2006), explored his area of specialty, which television viewers also got to experience in 1993 when PBS broadcast “Renaissance,” a five-part series that he helped create and for which he provided on-camera commentary.
A World Reborn 1 of 9CreditCreditVideo by pswiebe
Professor Rabb’s intellectual curiosity, however, took him far and wide.
His “The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters” (2011) examined thousands of years of art, beginning with ancient stone reliefs, to discuss how the depiction of warfare has changed and why. His most recent book, published last year, was “Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts.”
“The reach of his mind was phenomenal,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, said in a telephone interview, noting that he had been reading the “Michelangelo” book recently.
“I’d written in the margin about a third of this way through, ‘This book reminds me of how much I don’t know,’ ” he said.
Dr. Theodore K. Rabb was a leading historian of European History and the Renaissance who taught that the values of Western culture are an invaluable fountainhead of modern life. During an era in which scholars developed increasingly specialized interests, he adopted a sweeping academic approach—ranging from economic history to politics to painting and emphasizing the broad scope and lasting influence of ideas that flowered during the Renaissance. At Princeton University, where he taught for almost 40 years, Dr. Rabb spearheaded a popular and demanding four-course interdisciplinary humanities sequence that blended history, literature, and philosophy.
His books include The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975), in which he suggested that the artistic and scientific efflorescence of the Renaissance transformed a world of constant turmoil into one of relative tranquility. In later years, Dr. Rabb focused on cultural studies, publishing The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters in 2011 and Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts last year.
his works included:
The Thirty Years' War: Problems of Motive, Extent, and Effect (Boston, 1964)
Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)
The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)
Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Emergence of International Business 1200-1800, Volume III: Enterprise and Empire (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999)
The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
With Robert I. Rotberg, Rabb wrote:
The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
Industrialization and Urbanization: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
The New History, the 1980s and Beyond: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)
Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
with Ezra Suleiman, Rabb Wrote:
The Making and Unmaking of Democracy: Lessons from History and World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002)
Journal articles
In the Journal of Interdisciplinary History
'The Historian and the Climatologist', 10 (1980): 831-837
'Coherence, Synthesis, and Quality in History', 12 (1981): 315-332
'The Development of Quantification in Historical Research', 13 (1983): 591-601
'The Interdisciplinary Nature of American History', 16 (1985): 103-106
'The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History', 17 (1986): 1-6
'History and Religion: Interpretation and Illumination', 23 (1993): 445-451
'The Historian and Art: A New Maturity', 33 (2002): 87-93
'How Italian Was the Renaissance?', 33 (2003): 569-575
'Opera, Musicology, and History', 36 (2006): 321-330
Rabb's Review articles included,
'The Historian and the Art Historian', 4 (1973): 107-117
'The Historian and the Art Historian Revisited', 14 (1984): 647-655
'The Historian and the Art Historian, III: Recent Work on the Seventeenth Century', 20 (1990): 437-444
'Historians and Art Historians: A Lowering of Sights?', 27 (1996): 87-94
In Past & Present
'Religion and the Rise of Modern Science', 31 (1965): 111-126
'Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', 33 (1966): 148
'Free Trade and the Gentry in the Parliament of 1604', 40 (1968): 165-173
'The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance: A Comment', 52 (1971): 135-140
'The Role of the Commons', 92 (1981): 55-78
Rabb's Other journals Included:
'The Effects of the Thirty Years' War on the German Economy', The Journal of Modern History, 34 (1962): 40-51
'The Editions of Sir Edwin Sandys's "Relation of the State of Religion"', The Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (1963): 323-336
'Sir Edwin Sandys and the Parliament of 1604', The American Historical Review, 69 (1964): 646-670
'Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 1575-1630', The Economic History Review, 19 (1966): 70-81
'On Nominalism and Idealism, Historical and Statistical: A Response to Roger Schofield', The Historical Journal, 15 (1972): 788-793
'The Expansion of Europe and the Spirit of Capitalism', The Historical Journal, 17 (1974): 675-689
'Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance', English Historical Review, 118 (2003): 1384-1385
'Observations - Why Michelangelo Matters: His spiritual World has Vanished, But the Master's Quest for Perfection is Rightly Irresistible', Commentary, 122 (2006): 56
'Those Who Do Not Learn History...', Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (2007)
Rabb's Review articles Included:
'Parliament and Society in Early Stuart England: The Legacy of Wallace Notestein', The American Historical Review, 77 (1972): 705-714
'Early Modern Europe from Above and Below', The Journal of Modern History, 45 (1973): 456-462
Rabb's Documentery Appearances included:
A & E's Biography of the Millennium: 100 People - 1000 Years (1999)
Rabb was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia. He was raised in London. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford (B.A., 1958; M.A., 1962) and at Princeton University (M.A., 1960; Ph.D., 1961). His Ph.D. advisers were Elmore Harris Harbison and Frank Craven. Rabb was a professor of history at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University before becoming an Associate Professor at Princeton University in 1967.
He was a member of the Princeton faculty since 1967, teaching in both the History Department and in Humanistic Studies, an interdisciplinary program. He also directed Princeton’s Community College programs.
In 1970, he co-founded the Journal of Interdisciplinary History with Robert I. Rotberg. He was also an advisor for the 1993 television series Renaissance. He has chaired the National Council for History Education and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
Theodore Rabinowicz was born on March 5, 1937, in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia, to Oskar and Rose (Oliner) Rabinowicz. His father was an author and professor, and in 1939 the family emigrated, settling in London.
Theodore received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Queen’s College, Oxford, then furthered his education in 1958 at Princeton, studying European and colonial American history and receiving a Ph.D. in 1961.
He taught at Stanford, Northwestern and Harvard before returning to Princeton to join the faculty in 1967. He took emeritus status there in 2006.
At Princeton, in the 1990s, he and colleagues developed a demanding four-course humanities sequence that was an academic high point for the students who took it. It reflected his longstanding interest in cross-disciplinary explorations. He had been one of the founding editors, in 1970, of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, which he continued to edit.
Professor Rabb also ran an internship program that enabled Princeton students to begin their teaching careers at community colleges in the area.
“He was extremely active in trying to improve the status of teaching, the teaching of history,” Mr. McCullough said, citing Professor Rabb’s work with the National Council for History Education, where for a time he was chairman.
In addition to his books, Professor Rabb wrote scholarly articles, book reviews and more for a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review.
Other books, like “Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age” (1993) and “The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity” (2006), explored his area of specialty, which television viewers also got to experience in 1993 when PBS broadcast “Renaissance,” a five-part series that he helped create and for which he provided on-camera commentary.
A World Reborn 1 of 9CreditCreditVideo by pswiebe
Professor Rabb’s intellectual curiosity, however, took him far and wide.
His “The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters” (2011) examined thousands of years of art, beginning with ancient stone reliefs, to discuss how the depiction of warfare has changed and why. His most recent book, published last year, was “Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts.”
“The reach of his mind was phenomenal,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, said in a telephone interview, noting that he had been reading the “Michelangelo” book recently.
“I’d written in the margin about a third of this way through, ‘This book reminds me of how much I don’t know,’ ” he said.
Dr. Theodore K. Rabb was a leading historian of European History and the Renaissance who taught that the values of Western culture are an invaluable fountainhead of modern life. During an era in which scholars developed increasingly specialized interests, he adopted a sweeping academic approach—ranging from economic history to politics to painting and emphasizing the broad scope and lasting influence of ideas that flowered during the Renaissance. At Princeton University, where he taught for almost 40 years, Dr. Rabb spearheaded a popular and demanding four-course interdisciplinary humanities sequence that blended history, literature, and philosophy.
His books include The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975), in which he suggested that the artistic and scientific efflorescence of the Renaissance transformed a world of constant turmoil into one of relative tranquility. In later years, Dr. Rabb focused on cultural studies, publishing The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters in 2011 and Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian’s Questions About the Visual Arts last year.
his works included:
The Thirty Years' War: Problems of Motive, Extent, and Effect (Boston, 1964)
Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)
The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)
Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Emergence of International Business 1200-1800, Volume III: Enterprise and Empire (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999)
The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
With Robert I. Rotberg, Rabb wrote:
The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
Industrialization and Urbanization: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
The New History, the 1980s and Beyond: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)
Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
with Ezra Suleiman, Rabb Wrote:
The Making and Unmaking of Democracy: Lessons from History and World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002)
Journal articles
In the Journal of Interdisciplinary History
'The Historian and the Climatologist', 10 (1980): 831-837
'Coherence, Synthesis, and Quality in History', 12 (1981): 315-332
'The Development of Quantification in Historical Research', 13 (1983): 591-601
'The Interdisciplinary Nature of American History', 16 (1985): 103-106
'The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History', 17 (1986): 1-6
'History and Religion: Interpretation and Illumination', 23 (1993): 445-451
'The Historian and Art: A New Maturity', 33 (2002): 87-93
'How Italian Was the Renaissance?', 33 (2003): 569-575
'Opera, Musicology, and History', 36 (2006): 321-330
Rabb's Review articles included,
'The Historian and the Art Historian', 4 (1973): 107-117
'The Historian and the Art Historian Revisited', 14 (1984): 647-655
'The Historian and the Art Historian, III: Recent Work on the Seventeenth Century', 20 (1990): 437-444
'Historians and Art Historians: A Lowering of Sights?', 27 (1996): 87-94
In Past & Present
'Religion and the Rise of Modern Science', 31 (1965): 111-126
'Science, Religion and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', 33 (1966): 148
'Free Trade and the Gentry in the Parliament of 1604', 40 (1968): 165-173
'The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance: A Comment', 52 (1971): 135-140
'The Role of the Commons', 92 (1981): 55-78
Rabb's Other journals Included:
'The Effects of the Thirty Years' War on the German Economy', The Journal of Modern History, 34 (1962): 40-51
'The Editions of Sir Edwin Sandys's "Relation of the State of Religion"', The Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (1963): 323-336
'Sir Edwin Sandys and the Parliament of 1604', The American Historical Review, 69 (1964): 646-670
'Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 1575-1630', The Economic History Review, 19 (1966): 70-81
'On Nominalism and Idealism, Historical and Statistical: A Response to Roger Schofield', The Historical Journal, 15 (1972): 788-793
'The Expansion of Europe and the Spirit of Capitalism', The Historical Journal, 17 (1974): 675-689
'Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance', English Historical Review, 118 (2003): 1384-1385
'Observations - Why Michelangelo Matters: His spiritual World has Vanished, But the Master's Quest for Perfection is Rightly Irresistible', Commentary, 122 (2006): 56
'Those Who Do Not Learn History...', Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (2007)
Rabb's Review articles Included:
'Parliament and Society in Early Stuart England: The Legacy of Wallace Notestein', The American Historical Review, 77 (1972): 705-714
'Early Modern Europe from Above and Below', The Journal of Modern History, 45 (1973): 456-462
Rabb's Documentery Appearances included:
A & E's Biography of the Millennium: 100 People - 1000 Years (1999)
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