Although the United States lagged far behind European countries in instituting concrete social welfare policies, the earliest and most comprehensive philosophical justification for the welfare state was produced by the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward ( 1841 – 1913 ) whom the historian Henry Steele Commager called " the father of the modern welfare state ".

Henry Steele Commager ( October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998 ) was an American historian who helped define Modern liberalism in the United States for two generations through his forty books and 700 essays and reviews.

Commager, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked his way through the University of Chicago, earning the B. A., M. A., and Ph. D. degrees by the time he was twenty-eight.

Commager's first monograph was the 1936 biography, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, a life of the Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, reformer, and abolitionist Theodore Parker ; it was reissued in 1960, along with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best of Parker's voluminous writings.

Commager was coauthor, with Samuel Eliot Morison, of the widely-used history text The Growth of the American Republic ( 1930 ; 1937 ; 1942 ; 1950, 1962 ; 1969 ; 7th ed., with William E. Leuchtenburg, 1980 ; abridged editions in 1980 and 1983 under the title Concise History of the American Republic ).

Commager was a liberal interpreter of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which he understood as creating a powerful general government that at the same time recognized a wide spectrum of individual rights and liberties.

Although Commager was not deeply concerned with race in the early part of his career, he eventually became an advocate for civil rights for African-Americans, as he was for other groups.

In 1953 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Commager for advice for their argument before the Supreme Court for the case of Brown vs Board of Education, but at the time he was not persuaded that this litigation would succeed on historical grounds, and so advised the lawyers.

( Although Morison was responsible for the textbook's controversial section on slavery and references to the slave as " Sambo ," and although Commager was the junior member of the writing team when the book was first published and always deferred to Morison's greater age and academic stature, Commager has not been spared from charges of racism in this matter.

August A. Meier, a young professor at a black southern college, Tougaloo College, and a former student of Commager, corresponded with Morison and Commager during this period of time in an effort to get them to change their textbook and reported that Morison " just didn't get it " and didn't understand the negative effects that the Sambo stereotype was having on young impressionable students.

Meier, on the other hand, found that Commager, although at first woefully unaware of black history, was open-minded on the subject and willing to learn and change.

Morison was criticized by some African-American scholars for his treatment of American slavery in early editions of his book The Growth of the American Republic, which he co-wrote with Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg.

The prize was awarded to Dumas Malone ( 1984 ), C. Vann Woodward ( 1986 ), Richard B. Morris ( 1988 ), Henry Steele Commager ( 1990 ), Edmund S. Morgan ( 1992 ), John Hope Franklin ( 1994 ), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ( 1996 ), Richard N. Current ( 1998 ), Bernard Bailyn ( 2000 ), Gerda Lerner ( 2002 ), David Brion Davis ( 2004 ), and David Herbert Donald ( 2006 ).

To quote the historian Henry Steele Commager: " Ward was the first major scholar to attack this whole system of negativist and absolutist sociology and he remains the ablest .... Before Ward could begin to formulate that science of society which he hoped would inaugurate an era of such progress as the world had not yet seen, he had to destroy the superstitions that still held domain over the mind of his generation.

He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and educated at Columbia University, where his mentor for the Ph. D. degree was Henry Steele Commager.

Commager insisted, and taught generations of his students, that historians must write not only for one another but for a wider audience.

At Columbia, Commager mentored a series of distinguished historians who earned their Ph. D. degrees under his tutelage, including Harold Hyman, Leonard W. Levy, and William E. Leuchtenburg.

Historian Henry Commager wrote that " Even when definitions of terrorism allow for state terrorism, state actions in this area tend to be seen through the prism of war or national self-defense, not terror .” While states may accuse other states of state-sponsored terrorism when they support insurgencies, individuals who accuse their governments of terrorism are seen as radicals, because actions by legitimate governments are not generally seen as illegitimate.

Commager married author Evan Alexa Carroll ( b. Feb 4, 1904, d. Mar 28 1968 ) of Bennettsville, South Carolina on July 3, 1928 ; the couple had three children, Henry Steele Commager Jr., known as Steele Commager, who became an eminent classicist at Columbia University and wrote the leading book on the Roman poet Horace ; Elizabeth Carroll Commager ; and Nellie Thomas McCall Commager ( now Nell Lasch, wife of the historian Christopher Lasch ).

The two best-known collections were edited by Henry Steele Commager and published by Random House.

This classic biography met great critical acclaim, including an assessment by the eminent American historian Henry Steele Commager as " the best biography of Debs.

Later, Commager came to embrace the vigorous use of judicial review by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren to protect racial and religious minorities from discrimination and to safeguard individual liberties as protected by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Commager opposed McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, the war in Vietnam ( on constitutional grounds ), and what he saw as the rampant illegalities and unconstitutionalities perpetrated by the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

** Alan Brinkley, " The Public Professor " ( A review of " Henry Steele Commager " by Neil Jumonville ), New Republic, September 27, 1999, p. 42.

Holt was a strong proponent of American sovereignty and refused to sign a Declaration of Interdependence that 32 Senators and 92 Representatives signed in 1975, written by historian Henry Steele Commager.

Commager and his co-author Samuel Eliot Morison received vigorous criticism from African American intellectuals and other scholars for their very popular textbook The Growth of the American Republic, first published in 1930.

With his Columbia University colleague Allan Nevins, Commager helped to organize academic support for Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy.

Professors Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia University, both distinguished scholars, concur in the veracity and soundness of Professor Schlegel's research and conclusions.

Beard, Allan Nevins, and Henry Steele Commager.

In the late 1960s, Nevins and Commager parted ways over the issue of the war in Vietnam -- a war that Commager opposed on constitutional grounds and Nevins supported as a necessary part of the struggle in the cold war against Communism.

* Commager, Henry Steele and Morris, Richard B., eds.

Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlin, Commager shifted his research and teaching interests to American history.

In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, " In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.

* 1902 – Henry Steele Commager, American historian ( d. 1998 )

While at Columbia, his professors included Harry Carman, Henry Steele Commager, and David Donald.

Commager once said about teaching, " What every college must do is hold up before the young the spectacle of greatness.

The House was his habitat and there he flourished, first as a young representative, then as a forceful committee chairman, and finally in the post for which he seemed intended from birth, Speaker of the House, and second most powerful man in Washington.

In 1914 when the town was chosen for the U. S. Amateur Golf tournament, a representative hurried here from the Boston manager's office.

This method of countin' was usually done at the request, and in the presence, of a representative of the bank that held the papers against the herd.

The last obstacle in Mrs. Geraghty's globe-girdling trip was smoothed out when a representative of Syria called upon her to explain that his brother would meet her at the border of that country -- so newly separated from Egypt and the United Arab Republic that she hadn't been able to obtain a visa.

The American Thomas Jefferson was a representative agrarian who built Jeffersonian Democracy around the notion that farmers are “ the most valuable citizens ” and the truest republicans.

Although not the equal of Achilles in bravery, Agamemnon was a representative of kingly authority.

Alexander Aetolus () was a Greek poet and grammarian, the only known representative of Aetolian poetry.

In 1843, Johnson was the first Democrat to run for, and win, election as the U. S. representative from Tennessee's 1st congressional district, and joined a new Democratic majority in the House.

Greek democracy created at Athens was direct, rather than representative: any adult male citizen of age could take part, and it was a duty to do so.

The artist for whom he showed particular sympathy and regard in London was Benjamin Haydon, who might at the time be counted the sole representative of historical painting there, and whom he especially honored for his championship of the then recently transported to England and ignorantly depreciated by polite connoisseurs Parthenon's marbles.

The Australian National Football Council's primary role was to govern the game at national level to facilitate interstate representative and club competition.

In January 894 Bergamo fell, and Count Ambrose, Guy ’ s representative in the city, was hung from a tree by the city ’ s gate.

Not until 1186, however, was the last representative of the Ghaznavids uprooted by the Ghorids from his holdout in Lahore, in the Punjab.

In 1488 he was appointed Governor of the Netherlands ( until 1493 ) and marched with the imperial forces to free the Roman king Maximilian from his imprisonment at Bruges, and when, in 1489, the King returned to Germany, Albert was left as his representative to prosecute the war against the rebels.

However practice was variable: very high attendance at festivals was in most places the order of the day and in some places regular communion was very popular, in other places they stayed away or sent " a servant to be the liturgical representative of their household.

The 1662 prayer book was printed only two years after the restoration of the monarchy, following the Savoy Conference between representative Presbyterians and twelve bishops which was convened by Royal Warrant to " advise upon and review the Book of Common Prayer ".

Known as Tractarians after their production of Tracts for the Times on theological issues, they advanced the case for the Church of England being essentially a part of the ' Western Church ', of which the Roman Catholic Church was the chief representative.

But beyond time the Covenant of Redemption was made between the Father and Son, to agree that Christ would live an acceptable substitutionary life on behalf of, and as a covenantal representative for, those who would sin but would trust in Christ as their substitutionary atonement, which bought them into the Covenant of Grace.

Thus Hiranyakasipu was the perfect representative of materialistic life.

This institution, with its name, was later emulated by other powers and is reflected in the modern usage of the word ( see Consul ( representative )).