Isserman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on March 12, 1951. His mother, Flora (née Huffman), was the daughter and sister of Quaker ministers, graduated from a Quaker college, and was a social worker in Connecticut. His father Jacob (Jack) Isserman, born in Antwerp, came with his family to the US at age four in 1906; he was a machinist who worked at the Pratt and Whitney aircraft factory in East Hartford, Connecticut.
Isserman's parents had divorced in 1959, and his mother remarried Walter Snow, a local newspaper reporter who had been a Communist in the 1930s, a minor figure on the literary left (John Reed Club member, and the editor of The Anvil, a Midwestern radical literary magazine). They lived in the small town of Coventry, Connecticut. Maurice Isserman graduated from Coventry High School in 1968.
After his father's death in 1963, Maurice became close to his uncle Abraham, who took him to one of his first demonstrations, the 1967 March on the Pentagon.[4]
In the fall of 1968, Isserman enrolled in Reed CollegeinPortland, Oregon, where he joined the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and took part in antiwar protests and other New Left activism. In the spring of 1970, following the US invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State University strike, he dropped out of Reed College and joined the Portland Revolutionary Youth Movement (PRYM) collective. PRYM members were involved in antiwar activities in a local underground newspaper, The Willamette Bridge, and in the local food co-op. After a couple of years, PRYM disbanded, and Isserman returned to Reed to finish his undergraduate degree. He wrote a senior thesis on the history of radical American writers in the 1930s and worked on another underground newspaper, The Portland Scribe.[5] He graduated with a BA in history in 1973 and stayed on another year, working evenings as a proofreader for The Oregonian and days (unpaid) for The Portland Scribe.
In August 1974, Isserman began graduate work in history at the University of Rochester, working closely with Eugene Genovese and Christopher Lasch. He received his MA in American history in 1976 and his PhD in 1979. His dissertation was a history of American communism during the Second World War,[6] which became his first published book, Which Side Were You On? in 1982.
During this period, a debate broke out over the character of American communism, and Isserman's book was one of several criticized by Theodore Draper's two-part attack on the "new history of American Communism" in The New York Review of Books.[7][8] As the debate heated up, Isserman criticized books by Draper's protégé, Harvey Klehr.[9][10] Isserman returned to the theme with a chapter on the history of the CPUSA's "destalinization crisis" in his second book on the emergence of the New Left, If I Had a Hammer in 1987, and in his co-authored work with Healey, Dorothy Healey Remembers, in 1990 (reissued in paperback as California Red).
Isserman secured a tenure-track position at Hamilton College in 1990 as the James L. Ferguson Professor of History. After the debate over American communism, Isserman shifted his focus to the history of conflicts between left and right during the 1960s in his book with Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, now in its third edition. He wrote a prize-winning[clarification needed] biography of America's best known socialist of his time, Michael Harrington, leader of the Democratic Socialists of America.[11]
Beginning in 2008, Isserman has written several books and articles about mountaineering in the Himalayas[12][13][14] and in the United States.[15] He has also written a history of Hamilton College for its bicentennial in 2012.[16]
Isserman, Maurice. (1997). Journey to Freedom: The African American Great Migration.ISBN9780816034130
Isserman, Maurice & Kazin, Michael. (2000). America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.ISBN0-19-516047-9
Isserman, Maurice. (2000).The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. ISBN1-58648-036-7
Isserman, Maurice & Bowman, John. (2005). Exploring North America, 1800-1900. ISBN0816052638
Isserman, Maurice & Weaver, Stewart. (2008). Fallen Giants: The History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes. ISBN978-0300164206
Isserman, Maurice & Bowman, John Stewart. (2010). America at War: World War II.ISBN978-0816081851
Isserman, Maurice; Kenan, William R.; & Bowman, John Stewart. (2010). America at War: Vietnam War.ISBN978-0816081875
Isserman, Maurice & Bowman, John Stewart. (2010). Across America: The Lewis And Clark Expedition.ISBN9781604131925
Isserman, Maurice. (2011). On The Hill: A Bicentennial History of Hamilton College 1812–2012.ISBN978-0615432090
Cronkite, Walter & Isserman, Maurice. (2013). Cronkite's War: His World War II Letters Home. ISBN978-1426210198
Isserman, Maurice. (2016). Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering. ISBN978-0393353761
Isserman, Maurice. (2019). The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America's Elite Alpine Warriors.ISBN978-1328871435
Isserman, Maurice. (2024). Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.ISBN978-1541620032
On October 20, 2017, Isserman contributed to "Red Century," a New York Times centenary series about the Bolshevik Revolution, with the article "When New York City Was the Capital of American Communism."[21]
"How Old is the New SDS?" The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 19, 2007)[22]
"The Flower in the Gun Barrel," The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 19, 2007)[4]
"3 Days of Peace and Music, 40 Years of Memory," The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 19, 2007)[23]
"When New York City Was the Capital of American Communism," New York Times "Red Century" series (October 20, 2017)[21]
^Maurice Isserman, "1968 and All That: Radicals, Hippies and SDS at Reed," Reed Magazine, Winter 2007, pp. 26–30.
^Maurice Isserman, "The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism," Radical America, Vol. 14, No. 2, March–April 1980, pp. 43–51.
History
Socialism
