"Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting." -- Joyce Appleby
Joyce Oldham Appleby is Professor Emerita of History at UCLA. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians (1991) and the American Historical Association (1997).Appleby was born in 1929 in Omaha, Nebraska, of English, Scotch-Irish and Norwegian stock. Her father was a businessman, and she attended public schools in Omaha, Dallas, Kansas City, Evanston, Phoenix, and Pasadena.
Appleby received her BA degree from Stanford University in 1950, then became a magazine writer in New York. Returning to academe, she took her PhD from Claremont Graduate School in 1966. She taught at San Diego State University 1967-81, then became a professor of history at UCLA. She is the widow of Andrew Bell, a professor of European history at San Diego State University. They had three children.
Appleby is a specialist in historiography and the political thought of the early American Republic, with special interests in Republicanism, liberalism, and the history of ideas about capitalism. She has served on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals and editorial projects, and has received prominent national fellowships.
"Reconciliation and the Northern Novelist, 1865-1880", Civil War History, Vol. 10 (June 1964)
"The Jefferson-Adams Rupture and the First French Translation of John Adams' Defence", American Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 4 (April 1968)
"The New Republican Synthesis and the Changing Political Ideas of John Adams", American Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 5 (December 1973)
"Liberalism and the American Revolution", New England Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 1976)
"The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology", Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 4 (March 1978)
"Modernization Theory and the Formation of Modern Social Theories in England and America", Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (April 1978)
"Commercial Farming and the 'Agrarian Myth' in the Early Republic", Journal of American History, Vol. 68, No. 4 (March 1982)
"What Is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?", William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2 (April 1982)
"History as Art: Another View", American Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 1982)
"Republicanism and Ideology", American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Autumn 1985)
"Republicanism in Old and New Contexts", William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1 (January 1986)
"The American Heritage: The Heirs and the Disinherited", Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 3 (December 1987)
"One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving beyond the Linguistic; A Response to David Harlan", American Historical Review, Vol. 94, No. 5 (December 1989)
"Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism", Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 2 (September 1992)
"The Personal Roots of the First American Temperance Movement", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 141, No. 2 (June 1997)
"The Power of History", American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No.1 (February 1998)
"The Americans' Higher-Law Thinking behind Higher Lawmaking", Yale Law Journal, Vol. 108, No. 8 (June 1999)
Books
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) ISBN 0-691-05265-4
Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984) ISBN 0-8147-0581-2
Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992) ISBN 0-674-53012-8
(co-author) Telling the Truth About History (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994) ISBN 978-0-393-31286-7
(ed.) Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1996) ISBN 0-415-91382-9
(ed.) Recollections of the Early Republic: Selected Autobiographies (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997) ISBN 1-55553-301-9
Inheriting the Revolution : The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2000) ISBN 0-674-00236-9
The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) ISBN 978-0-393-06894-8