Joel Henry Silbey (August 16, 1933 – August 7, 2018) was an American historian who spent his career atCornell University and was the President White Professor of History Emeritus there. Silbey was known for his studies of thehistory of the United States in the 19th century and especially theJacksonian era, the creation and evolution ofU.S. political parties, the sectional crises of the 1840s and 1850s, and theAmerican Civil War andReconstruction era. He used the techniques ofquantitative history and became known as one of "New Political Historians".^[1]

Joel H. Silbey was born on August 16, 1933, to parents Sidney R. and Estelle Silbey. He attendedBrooklyn College in his hometown, graduating in 1955, before pursuing graduate study at theUniversity of Iowa, earning his master's and doctoral degrees in 1956 and 1963, respectively. He taught atSan Francisco State College, theUniversity of Pittsburgh, and theUniversity of Maryland before joining theCornell University faculty in 1966. Two years later, Silbey became a full professor.^[2]

A recipient of the Clark Distinguished Faculty Award for undergraduate teaching,^[3] the courses Silbey taught included "The United States in the Middle Period, 1815–1850", "The Structure of American Political History", "The American Civil War and Reconstruction", and "Quantitative Approaches in History", as well as freshman, upper-class, and graduate seminars in various aspects of nineteenth-century American political history.^[4] Silbey also directed the Cornell-In-Washington program.^[3]

Silbey received aGuggenheim Fellowship. He was appointed President White Professor of History in 1986, serving until retirement in 2002. He died at the age of 84 on August 7, 2018.^[5]

• The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841–1852 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967)
• The Transformation of American Politics, 1840–1860 (Prentice-Hall, 1967, American Historical Sources Series) [editor and author of introductory essay]
• The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1985)
• The Congress of the United States, 1789–1989 (Carlson Publications, 1991) [editor]
• The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford University Press, 1991)
• Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)

• 1933 births
• 2018 deaths
• 20th-century American historians
• American male non-fiction writers
• 21st-century American historians
• 21st-century American male writers
• Brooklyn College alumni
• Writers from Brooklyn
• Cornell University faculty
• San Francisco State University faculty
• University of Maryland, College Park faculty
• University of Pittsburgh faculty
• Historians of the United States
• Political historians
• Historians from New York (state)
• 20th-century American male writers

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