Alan B. Spitzer

Alan Barrie Spitzer (March 27, 1925 – July 23, 2024) was an American historian who served as a professor emeritus.

He was associated with combining intellectual history with social historical methods, including prosopography and quantitative history, and with methodological work on how generations can be defined and used as an analytic category. His scholarship focused on political and intellectual currents in France during the Bourbon Restoration and nearby decades. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1943 and was wounded in action in November 1944. Later, he received a Purple Heart.

He undertook graduate study at Columbia University and earned a doctorate in 1955.

His book The French Generation of 1820 (1987) used a bounded cohort approach to analyze intellectual networks, political sensibilities, and career pathways among a group defined by shared formative experiences around the end of empire and the early Restoration. His methodological influence on generational analysis was strongly associated with his 1973 article "The Historical Problem of Generations" in The American Historical Review.

Spitzer also served as president of the Society for French Historical Studies in 1982 and 1983 and held editorial board roles with journals including the Journal of Modern History and French Historical Studies.

After retirement, Spitzer published Historical Truth and Lies About the Past (1996), an essay collection on historical truth, standards of evidence, and public controversies about the past.

Selected works The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui (1957)