Richard Polenberg 
Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History
Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow
Office: 136 McGraw Hall
Phone: (607) 255-6741
Fax: (607) 255-0469
E-Mail: rp19@cornell.edu
Office Hours: TR 10:15-11:15
Research & Teaching Statement
A photo of me with Pete Seeger at his home on the Hudson River, January, 2009.
I have begun phased retirement and therefore no longer supervise the work of graduate students. I teach only in the fall semester and offer two undergraduate seminars: one on the Supreme Court, Crime, and the Constitution; and the other on the Blues and American Culture. For the last year and a half, I have hosted a web-based radio show on folk music and the blues called "Key to the Highway". I have also presented a lecture/demonstration on "Woody Guthrie: His Life, Times, and Music"and "Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and the Crisis of the 1930s". Links to these are available below.
Courses
| Fall 2009: | 2020 |
The Court, Crime, and Constitution |
|---|---|---|
4400 |
Undergraduate Seminar in Recent American History | |
| Spring 2010: | On Leave |
Education
Ph.D. Columbia University, 1964
M.A. Columbia University, 1959
B.A. Brooklyn College, 1958
Recent Publications and Awards
Books
Co-author, with Walter Lafeber and Nancy Woloch, The American Century: A History of the United States since the 1890s, (6th ed., Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2008).
Editor, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Editor, The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000).
The World of Benjamin Cardozo: Personal Values and the Judicial Process (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997; paperback, 1999).
Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, The Supreme Court, and Free Speech (New York: Viking Press, 1987; Penguin Books edition, 1989; Cornell University Press ed., 1999).
Articles
"The Ethical Responsibilities of the Scientist: The Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, in William Chafe (ed.), The Achievement of American Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 129-159.
"The Right to Have Rights: Citizens, Aliens and the Law in Modern America," in R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., The American Century in Europe (Cornell University Press, 2003), 262-274.
"Freedom of Speech, The Search for Truth, and the Value of Experimentation," Zmanim, VII (Summer, 1987); reprinted in Arnon Gutfield (ed.), American Democracy: The Real, the Imagined and the False (Ganei-Aviv, Israel, 2002), 330-335.
"On Doing Legal Resesarch at 'America's Library,'" The Green Bag: An Entertaining Journal of Law (Autumn, 2000), 17-22.
"The 'Saintly' Cardozo: Character and the Criminal Law," University of Colorado Law Review (Special Issue, 2000), 1311-1326.
"Introduction," The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (Penguin Books, 1997), ix-xlvii.
Awards
Clark Distinguished Teaching Award, 1979
American Bar Association, Silver Gavel Award, 1987
Links
Key to the Highway http://slopemedia.org/tag/key-to-the-highway
Woody Guthrie: His Life, Times, and Music http://sandstone5.cit.cornell.edu/Requester/r/roomMain/Guthrie
Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and the Crisis of the 1930s http://www.cornell.edu/video/details.cfm?vidID=390&display=preferences