Profile Major Works Resources

Bernard Moses, 1846-1931.

American "New Generation" historian and social scientist at the University of California-Berkeley.

Bernard Moses obtained his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1870, and, like many Americans at the time, took a graduate tour of  Germany, eventually earning his Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1873, before returning to the United States. .

After a brief stint at Alboin, Bernard Moses was hired by the University of California Berkeley in 1876, at a particularly chaotic period in the fledgling university's history.  Its president, Daniel Coit Gilman, had departed the previous year, due to entanglements with the politics of California state legislature.  Newly-minted Moses was brought in to essentially  take over all the social science classes abandoned with Gilman's departure. 

Bernard Moses taught all the economics, history and jurisprudence courses at Berkeley almost single-handedly for the next fifteen years.  For his economics courses, Moses relied on an eclectic mix of Perry, Fawcett and Cossa for texts.  Moses founded the short-lived Berkeley Quarterly in 1880, and carved out the Department of History and Political Science in 1882.

Although never made university president, Bernard Moses was arguably the most prominent faculty member at Berkeley, and shepherded economics and the social sciences through the political storms that frequently battered Berkeley from the 1870s through the end of the 1890s. Moses was gradually relieved of economics classes by the hiring of new faculty (notably Carl Plehn in 1892), allowing Moses to specialize more in economic history. Moses became a pre-eminent authority on the history of imperial Spain and Latin America..  When the Department of Economics was separated in 1902 under A.C. Miller, Moses remaining a strong and influential presence.  Moses was vital in giving early Berkeley economics its historicist-institutionalist tinge.

Moses retired in 1911.

 

  

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Major Works of Bernard Moses

  •  "Social Science at its Method", 1880, Berkeley Quarterly, v.1, p.1
  • "The Communism of Early Christianity", 1880, Berkeley Quarterly, v.1, p.211
  • "The Crown and Parliament in Sweden", 1880, Berkeley Quarterly, v.1, p.268
  • "Early Swedish Literature", 1881, Berkeley Quarterly, v.2, p.12
  • "About Swedish Literature in the Eighteenth Century", 1881, Berkeley Quarterly, v.2, p.225
  • "The Extension of the Curriculum", 1881, Berkeley Quarterly, v.2, p.336
  • Politics: An introduction to the study of comparative constitutional law with W.W. Crane, 1883 [1898 ed, av]
  • Imperial Germany: a lecture, 1886 [av]
  • Social Infelicities of Half-knowledge: an address, 1886 [av]
  • Data of Mexico and United States' History, 1887 [av]
  • "The Establishment of Municipal Government in San Francisco", 1889, JHU Studies [av]
  • The Federal Government of Switzerland: An essay on constitution, 1889 [av]
  • "The Social Sciences as Aids in Teaching History", 1891, Addresses before the California Teachers' Association, p.16
  • "The Economic Condition of Spain in the Sixteenth Century", 1893, JPE (Sep), p.513 [js]
  • "The Economic Condition of Spain in the Sixteenth Century", 1894, Annual Report of AHA, [av]
  • "The Nature of Sociology" 1894, JPE (Dec), p.24 [js]
  • The Railway Revolution in Mexico, 1895 [av]
  • "Certain Tendencies in Political Economy", 1897, QJE (Jul) , p.372 [js]
  • The Establishment of Spanish Rule in America: An introduction to the history and politics of Spanish America, 1898 [bk, av]
  • "The Economic Situation in Japan", 1898, JPE (Mar), p.168 [js]
  • Democracy and Social Growth in America, 1898 [av]
  • "The Recent War with Spain from a Historical Point of View", 1899, Univ Chron, p.400 [av]
  • "New Problems in the Study of Society", 1900, Univ Chron, p.13
  • "The Ethical Importance of Our New Problems", 1900, Univ Chron, p.205
  • "The Western experiment with personal independence", 1904-05, Univ Chron, p.25
  • "The Control of dependencies inhabited by the less developed races", 1904-05, Univ Chron,  p.84
  • "The Organisation of Public Instruction in the Philippines", 1905-06, Univ Chron, p.93
  • "Results of the War between Russia and Japan", 1905-06, Univ Chron, p.118
  • "Arbitration", 1906, Univ Chron, p.259
  • The Government of the United States, 1906 [av]
  • South America on the Eve of Emancipation, 1908 [av]
  • Spanish Dependencies in South America: an introduction to the history of their civilization, 1914, v.1, v.2 [av1, av2]
  • Spain's Declining Power in South America, 1730-1806, 1919 [av]
  • Spanish Colonial Literature in South America, 1922 [av]
  • Spain Overseas, 1929 [av]

 
HET

 
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Resources on Bernard Moses

  • "Review of Moses's Establishment of Spanish Rule in America", HP Judson, 1898, JPE: (Dec) p.135 [js]
  • Guide to Moses papers at OAC

 

 
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