Richard R. Stenberg

Richard R. Stenberg (b. ) was an American historian. During the 1930s and early 1940s he wrote several influential papers on the U.S. politics and events of the second quarter of the 19th century, sometimes known as the Jacksonian era. He also worked as regional administrator of Federal One's Historical Records Survey. He then largely disappeared from the public record himself, apparently having been confined to a hospital in Washington, D.C.

Life and work Stenberg was born around 1910 in Nebraska. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas with a major in history and a minor in government. He did his master's degree and his doctorate at the University of Texas. In 1934 he was hired to teach European history at the University of Arkansas. At the time of his son's birth in 1937, he reported to the registrar that he had worked as a teacher at the University of Texas for the past four years. In 1939 he was assistant editor of the HRS's Federal Archives Inventories.

Stenberg is remembered for consistently attacking what was then consensus view of historyrepresented in his time by figures including John S. Bassett and Eugene Barkerand he "particularly assaulted the reputations of Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Sam Houston." As part of Stenberg's "debunking" set-the-record-straight style, he was in the habit of "ignoring any other possible interpretation of his evidence, unless he use it to show how wrong it was." In 1958, Charles G. Sellers described him "Jackson's most inveterate scholarly foe in the twentieth century." Stenberg intended to produce a book called The Insidious Andrew Jackson, which was never published, but nonetheless "Stenberg's point of view gained some currency through a series of articles." Jackson's research on the relationship between Sam Houston and Jackson and American expansionism into Texas was considered almost transgressive to some in the 1930s but by the 1970s the work was deemed "brilliant" and "endlessly cited." Edward Pessen both recommended Stenberg's Jackson-critical articles and called them "studies in vitriol." Donald Ratliffe wrote in his 2015 history of the 1824 U.S. presidential election that "One does not have to accept Richard R. Stenberg's character assassination of Jackson in his 'Jackson, Buchanan, and the Corrupt Bargain Calumny'...to appreciate his demonstration of the thinness of the evidence for the 'bargain and corruption' charge."

Personal life His father taught at Culver Academy in Indiana in 1910. His wife seems to have filed for divorce in San Antonio in 1938. Stenberg, his wife, and their two year old son were resident in Washington, D.C. in 1940, with Stenberg employed as a teacher college. Stenberg was an inmate of St. Elizabeth's Asylum in Washington, D.C. at the time of the 1950 U.S. census.

Selected publications