Chester Starr

Chester G. Starr (Centralia, Missouri, October 5, 1914 - Ann Arbor, Michigan, 22 September 1999) was an American historian, as well as an authority on Ancient History, and the ancient art and archeology of the Greco-Roman civilization.

He studied at the Cornell University, with Max Ludwig Wolfram Laistner. Between 1940 and 1953 was lecturer of History at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He then became a professor in the same department, a position he held until 1970. After thirty years at Urbana, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he practiced until 1973, in an environment much more to his liking. From 1973 to 1985 he held the Bentley Chair at Michigan. In 1974 he was the first president of the American Association of Ancient Historians.

During World War II he served in the history section of the Army of the United States, with the headquarters of the Fifth Army in Italy from 1942 to 1946. As a result of that commission, he wrote a nine-volume compilation entitled Fifth Army History, and a popular book about it titled From Salerno to the Alps (1948).

Among his historical works are twenty-one books, dozens of articles and over one hundred book reviews. His best-known university text, A History of the Ancient World, was reissued with successive enlargements between 1965 and 1991. His historiographical methodology has been described as Hegelian, especially in Civilization and the Caesars: the intellectual revolution in the Roman Empire (1954). In what has been called his greatest work: The Origins of Greek Civilization (1961), he dismantles the Nordic theory which sought to interpret the Greek cultural achievements in terms of a master race. His approach focuses on individuals as agents of historical change, also opposing the dominant methodology of the time: the Annales School and the Braudelian concept of longue durée.

Among his other works are The Awakening of the Greek Historical Spirit (1968), Economic Growth of Early Greece (1977), The Beginnings of Imperial Rome: Rome in the Mid-Republic (1980), The Flawed Mirror (1983) and Past and Future in Ancient History (1987).^[1]

Notes

1. ^ Josiah Ober Article inThe Independent 15 October 1999.

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Date of birth	October 5, 1914
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Date of death	22 September 1999
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