Mark A. Kishlansky, Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of History, was a pre-eminent political historian of Stuart England and served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1998 to 2001. Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, he earned his B.A. at the State University of New York–Stony Brook in 1970, writing a senior thesis on Hilaire Belloc. He received his M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1977) from Brown University under David Underdown, a prominent scholar of seventeenth-century British history. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1975 to 1991 and became a member of the Committee on Social Thought there in 1990. In 1991 he was appointed Professor of History at Harvard, becoming the third member of Harvard’s distinguished post-war trio of Tudor-Stuart historians, succeeding W. K. Jordan (1943–70), who was also the President of Radcliffe, and Wallace MacCaffrey (1968–90), the foremost authority on politics in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Kishlansky first made a name for himself during the late 1970s as one of the pioneers in the revisionist history of the early Stuart monarchy. Opposing as anachronistic Marxist and Whiggish models of historical development, the revisionist interpretation emphasized the influence of religious controversy, royal finance, the fortunes of battle, and changing institutional frameworks as well as contingent personalities and events. Kishlansky contributed to the ferment in two key monographs, The Rise of the New Model Army (1979) and Parliamentary Selection (1986), both of which demonstrated a command of the relevant printed, manuscript, and archival sources as well as a mastery of historical argumentation. These skills reflected Kishlansky’s pugnacious character and commitment to what he often described as the historian’s first duty: getting it right.

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