Melvin urofsky biography
BIOGRAPHY..
Impertinent Questions with Melvin I. Urofsky
What attracted you to Brandeis as a subject?
His relationship with Woodrow Wilson, which I hoped to turn into a dissertation at Columbia.
That idea failed, but a few days into the Brandeis Papers at the University of Louisville convinced me that he was a fascinating character tied into many of the important reforms and legal developments of the first half of the twentieth century.
Biographers often talk about living with their subject.
What kind of company was he?
I found him interesting company, but not the sort of man one grows close to.
Brandeis grew up in Louisville, Kentucky.
Melvin I. Urofsky is an American historian, and professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University.
How did that shape him?
Recall that Kentucky was a border state, and that during the Civil War Kentuckians were split in their allegiances. The Brandeis family was pro-Union and antislavery, and that certainly affected him.
But he also imbibed Southern manners. In his eighties, at a dinner party, he would not sit down until all of the women guests ha