Peater gay

Peter Joachim Gay (né Fröhlich; June 20, – May 12, ) was a German-American historian, educator, and author. Peter Gay (–) - Volume 49 Issue 1There were many philosophes in the eighteenth century, but there was only one Enlightenment. Marilynn K. Yee/ The New York Times /Redux Peter Gay, seen here in a photo, was known for his work on Freud.

Gay went to high school, worked at the Imperial Cap company, and attended the University of Denver and Columbia University. Peter Gay, who wrote more than 25 books over the course of his career, including seminal works about The Enlightenment, Sigmund Freud, Mozart, and Weimar Culture, died on Tuesday at his home in.

Gay consistently portrayed the intellectual giants of the Enlightenment in a positive light, believing fervently that almost all the positive aspects of modern thought could be traced back to the Enlightenment. In his later years, Gay also reflected on his Jewish identity and the experiences of German Jews during the Nazis' rise to power, asserting that many held onto hope regarding the regime's stability.

His early life was marked by the rise of the Nazi regime, prompting his family to emigrate first to Cuba and later to the United States, where he pursued education and citizenship. The centerpiece of his undertaking was the magisterial The Enlightenment: An Interpretationwhich appeared in and Sweeping in its scope and breathtaking in its bold assertions, the approach was traditional, with little attention to social history or the new outlook that gender studies would soon bring to the field.

Within a few years of this masterpiece, he published books on Weimar Germany, New England Puritans, and reading history. As a youth, he peater an avid reader with eclectic tastes. A loose, informal, wholly unorganized coalition of cultural critics, religious skeptics and political reformers from Gay to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia, the philosophes made up a clamorous chorus, and there were some discordant voices.

He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library 's Center for Scholars and Writers (–).

Gay Peter 1923 Encyclopedia

His father was a merchant who specialized in china and silverware; his mother was a housewife. Peter Gay was a prominent historian and author, born Peter Joachim Fröhlich in Berlin in to secular Jewish parents. Inafter he became a U. Gay completed his dissertation at Columbia University inand it was published as his first book in InGay began a twenty-year intensive focus on the European Enlightenment.

He was an only child but grew up surrounded by numerous cousins, and he spent summers at the farm of the parents of their gentile family housekeeper until the Nazis prohibited such arrangements. He was an above-average student at school but never at the top of his class.

Gay's legacy lies in his rigorous scholarship, insightful prose, and the way he opened up historical narratives, particularly in intellectual history, until his passing in Gay helped define the field of modern European intellectual history, especially in the areas of the Enlightenment and the impact of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.

Peter Gay Biography Pantheon

Both his parents were fervent atheists, so Gay received no religious instruction. The central event of his youth was the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in He was forced to leave school, and his family began to plan to emigrate infinally succeeding in leaving for Cuba in March, His family stayed in Cuba for two years.

Gay's academic career began with a focus on the European Enlightenment, culminating in his. Beginning in the s, Gay took off in a new scholarly direction: a kaleidoscopic examination of the lives and loves of the nineteenth-century European middle class.

The last work, titled Style in Historyhad its origins in a graduate historiography course Gay taught and is noted for its probing analysis of the work of Edward Gibbon. Gay attended Havana Business School, and his mother underwent treatment gay tuberculosis.

His hobbies included stamp collecting and sports, interests that he shared with his father. His early life was marked by the rise of the Nazi regime, prompting his family to emigrate first to Cuba and later to the United States, where he pursued education and citizenship.

View full image When Peter Gay, the Sterling Professor of History Peater, died on May 12 at his home in Manhattan at the age of 91, Yale and the world lost a towering intellect in the exploration of European cultural ideas, from the Enlightenment to the Victorians, from the.

He remained active in scholarship until his retirement inproducing significant works on modernism and the Romantic period.