Philip J. Greven Jr. Papers

Philip J. Greven Jr. was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on May 4, 1935. He graduated from Harvard College in 1957 receiving his AB in Government. In 1958, Greven earned his Master of Arts in History from Columbia University. He went on to receive a PhD in History from Harvard University. Greven was one of the first historians to combine psychology and history, creating a new idea of what social history could be. His research centered on the early American family.

In 1964, Greven began his teaching career at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. In 1967 he joined the Rutgers University history faculty rising through the ranks from Associate Professor to Professor II before retiring in 2000 and becoming Professor II Emeritus. Greven's teaching focus was on early American History. He taught classes on the history of child-rearing and family, biography and autobiography, the use of psychology in history, and religion and American culture.

Greven married Helen Stokes on November 30, 1963. They had two children, Philip J. Greven III born July 22, 1966, and Hannah Greven born November 18, 1969.

Greven became a noted historian for his first book Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (1970). Greven's next book, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (1977) explored aspects of Evangelical, Moderate, and Genteel Anglo-American lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book received popular attention and earned great critical acclaim for Greven's new way of researching and writing about United States Colonial History. His research revolved around "regular" people. What is now commonly referred to as social history was a new idea for historians in the 1960s and 1970s. His last book, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (1990) ranged from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century focusing upon the issue of corporal punishment of children.

Additionally, during his career at Rutgers, Greven was a highly respected and noted advocate for preventing child abuse, speaking out against child abuse, spanking, and paddling. Greven traveled the country raising awareness to combat the "corporal punishment" of children. Greven was also a major organizer for the group EPOCH-USA (End Physical Punishment of Children). His career as an advocate against child abuse is just as significant as his career as an historian.