(Clarence) Crane Brinton

Historian and teacher, born in Winsted, Connecticut, USA. He studied at Harvard and Oxford universities, and became known as a brilliant, cosmopolitan scholar and writer as well as a popular teacher at Harvard (1923–68). He worked for the Office of Strategic Services in London (1942–5) during World War 2. An authority on revolutions and a proponent of ‘intellectual history’, his 15 books include The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), A History of Western Morals (1959), and The Americans and the French (1968).

(Clarence) Crane Brinton (Winsted, Connecticut 1898 –Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sep 7, 1968), American historian of France and the history of ideas.

Born in Winsted, Connecticut,his family soon moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he grew up. Receiving a Dr. Phil there in 1923, Brinton began teaching at Harvard University that same year, becoming full professor in 1942 and remaining at Harvard until his death.

His many books include:

The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History (1930), a detailed account of the political radicals of the French Revolution A Decade of Revolution (1934), a study of the French Revolution The Anatomy of Revolution (1938, revised 1965) Ideas and Men: the Story of Western Thought (1950, 1963), an account of western thought from ancient Greece to the present A History of Western Morals (1959), an account of ethical questions The Shaping of the Modern Mind (1963), an abridged version of his Ideas and Men The Americans and the French (1968), an attempt to explain the often difficult relations between two long-time allies.

For many years he taught a course at Harvard known to his students as "Breakfast with Brinton."

Crane Brinton was Witty, convivial, urbane, and fluent in French, during WWII he was for a time Chief of Research and Analysis in London in the Office of Strategic Services.

In 1968, Crane Brinton testified at the Fulbright Senate hearings on the Vietnam war as to the nature of the Vietnamese opposition.