Oscar Handlin vs. J.F. Kennedy

Comparison / Contrast of Oscar Handlin & J.F. Kennedy

Introduction

Oscar Handlin, a Harvard professor whose classic writings on American immigration made him a leading intellectual force behind legislation that eliminated the immigration quota system in the United States Dr. Handlin's credentials as a historian, the Harvard imprimatur and his frequent writings — in publications including the Atlantic Monthly and Commentary — made him an influential public intellectual in his time. Historians cite him as a crucial behind-the-scenes player in the landmark 1965 legislation that abolished the country-based quota systems that had regulated immigration since the 1920s. (Feeney 2011)

Whereas on the other hand was the thirty-fifth president of the United States and the youngest to be assassinated. He also served in World War II on a PT boat. He also helped to solve the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was assassinated in 1963 in dallas texas. He also started the peace corps to help 3rd world countries better themselves. (Brauer 2009)  Three forces

Handlin dealt with immigration history from a different vantage point in his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, The Uprooted (1951), his most popular and accessible work. It focused on what was common to the experience of most immigrants to American shores, and subtly analyzed the psychology of the newcomers. Written in richly evocative prose, it stressed the peasant origins of most of the peoples arriving in the great migration waves of the 19th and early-20th centuries, and the wrenching hardships entailed in their move from a fixed European social order to the fluid and dynamic American one. Later historians would question Handlin's model of peasant society, but no one has subsequently covered the whole subject more convincingly in a single, brief volume. (Feeney 2011)

John F. Kennedy was born of Irish decent in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. In 1940 he entered the second World War and he served on a PT. In 1943 when his PT was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, even though he was injured severely he still helped survivors to safety. After the war he became a Democratic Congression from the Boston area, moving on to a senator in 1953. He married Jacqueline Bouvier on September, 1953. In 1955, he wrote a book called "Profiles of Courage" which won the Pulitzer prize in history(Brauer 2009).

Handlin further explored the themes of Boston's Immigrants and The Uprooted in many subsequent works that remain relevant today, including The American People in the 20th Century, Race and Nationality in American Life, and The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis. Differences in national origin, ethnicity, race, and religion—what later scholars would term "ethnocultural" differences—were enduring factors in American life, and no scholar did more to enlarge our knowledge of them. If you wish to understand the peopling of America, Handlin's works remain the essential starting point.

In 1956 Kennedy almost gained the democratic Vice President, and four years later he was the first-ballot nominee for president. Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic ...