John Fiske (redirected from Edmund Fisk Green)

Fiske, John 

Born Mar. 30, 1842, in Hartford, Conn.; died July 4, 1901, in Gloucester, Mass. American historian and philosopher.

Fiske was significantly influenced by H. Spencer. In his historical studies he made use of a comparative method to examine political institutions, ignoring the socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to them and attributing the similar traits of various political systems over the course of history to racial community. Fiske preached the racial superiority of the Aryans and the inevitability of the spread of Anglo-Saxon political institutions throughout the world. He traced the development of the US bourgeois political system to the growth of Teutonic ideas and to the growth of the federal and local governments. In his works devoted to the colonial period in American history and to the American Revolution, Fiske attributed the cause of the war to the political shortsightedness of the British government.

WORKS

The Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vols. 1–4. Boston, 1903.
The Beginnings of New England. Boston–New York, 1930.
American Political Ideas Viewed From the Standpoint of Universal History. Boston–New York [1917].
The War of Independence. Boston, 1917.
The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789. Boston–New York, 1898.

REFERENCE

Dement’ev, I. P. “Istoricheskie vzgliady Dzh. Fiske.” In the collection Istoriia i istoriki, 1971. Moscow, 1973.

I. P. DEMENT’EV