Lawrence W. Levine, a former UC Berkeley historian and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient whose elegant scholarship bolstered arguments for multiculturalism in higher education, died of cancer Oct. 23 at his Berkeley home. He was 73.
Levine advocated a catholic definition of culture in several books written over the last four decades, including "Highbrow and Lowbrow, The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America" (1988).
The most admired of his books was "Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom" (1977), an engaging examination of black oral expression -- including spirituals, gospel songs, folklore and humor -- that demonstrated the richness and diversity of black culture from the slavery era to more modern times.
"He was really one of the key people who invented the field of American cultural history," said Roy Rosenzweig, founder and director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia. Levine joined the history faculty at George Mason in 1994 after 32 years at Berkeley.
Particularly in "Black Culture and Black Consciousness," Rosenzweig said, Levine demonstrated that intellectual history is "not just the study of Emerson and Thoreau but the study of Negro spirituals and folk tales. These are the intellectual and cultural achievements of ordinary people. He wanted to recover that achievement and analyze it."
In so doing, Levine influenced his field by "redefining the content of history," said Leon Litwack, a UC Berkeley historian who knew Levine for 40 years.
A former president of the Organization of American Historians, Levine also wrote "The Opening of the American Mind" (1996), which attracted wide attention as a forceful answer to conservative critics such as philosopher Allan Bloom, who fueled the culture wars of the 1980s with charges that political correctness was ruining the university.
The title was a deliberate takeoff on Bloom's 1987 bestseller, "The Closing of the American Mind," a complex treatise that blamed contemporary social movements, including feminism and civil rights, for deemphasizing Western intellectual traditions.
Levine was born to a working-class family in New York City on Feb. 27, 1933. He helped his father, a Lithuanian immigrant, run a fruit and vegetable store, even while a student at City College of New York, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1955, and at Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1957 and a PhD in 1962.
