Jacques Barzun

Who was Jacques Barzun?

Jacques Martin Barzun was a French-born American historian of ideas and culture, who wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball and classical music, yet is known best as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America, Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States. He published more than forty books, was awarded the American Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was dubbed a knight of the French Legion of Honor. His magnum opus, the historical retrospective From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, was published when he was 93 years old.