Gertrude Himmelfarb (born August 8 1922), also known as Bea Kristol, is an American historian known for her studies of the intellectual history of the Victorian era, particularly of Social Darwinism; and as a conservative cultural critic. She is also known as an outspoken commentator of university education. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2004.

She was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, and was educated at New Utrecht High School and Brooklyn College. Her doctoral work was at the University of Chicago.

She is now Professor Emeritus of the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She married Irving Kristol in 1942, but has always written as an academic under her maiden name. Their son, William Kristol, is the editor of the Weekly Standard and chairman of the American neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century, or PNAC. She is also sister to the late Milton Himmelfarb of the American Jewish Committee.

Gertrude Himmelfarb serves on the advisory board of the new British conservative magazine Standpoint as she currently does on the Council of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. ^[1]

Works

• Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952)
• Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959)
• Victorian Minds (1968)
• On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (1974)
• The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984)
• Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (1986)
• The New History and the Old (1987)
• Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991)
• On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (1994)
• The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1995)
• One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution (2001)
• The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004)
• The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (2006)

References

1. ↑ http://www.aei.org/about/contentID.20038142214500076/default.asp The American Enterprise Institute website