Lawrence Levine

A historian revelling in the cultural diversity of America
'Multiculturalism may be a relatively new term," remarked the American cultural historian Lawrence Levine, "but the debate over it is an old one that has occupied us from early in our existence as a people." Widely known for The Opening of the American Mind (1996), a riposte to Allan Bloom's bestselling 1987 polemic about its closing, Levine, who has died aged 73, wrote innovative, stimulating explorations of such topics as plantation spirituals and turbulent 19th-century opera houses.

He had been alerted early to the world at large by the small Manhattan fruit and vegetable store to which his parents gave an "amazing amount of labour and attention". His father - and seven siblings - had arrived in New York in 1914 from Lithuania, where his grandfather was a butcher who sold the rear half of cows to gentiles and the front to his fellow Jews. Levine's mother was born in East Harlem, her housepainter father having deserted from the Russian army during the 1904 war with Japan.

From his father's enthusiasms for Yiddish and baseball, Levine quickly appreciated multiple cultures - "I could have had both Moses and Lincoln for fore- fathers," he once reflected. In 1950, this spirit proved lacking at New York City College, where he studied history, a contrast with the diverse people he had met at the Royal Roost, Birdland and Bop City listening to Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, among others.

"The history courses required that I read very fat, and exceedingly dull and predictable, textbooks, which rarely diverged from a straightforward narrative," Levine recalled. He found graduate study at Columbia University with the political scientist Richard Hofstadter more refreshing, and while working on a thesis about William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) became fascinated by the American radical's rural, white Protestant followers. It formed the basis of his first book, published in 1965.

By now Levine was teaching at Berkeley, having married Cornelia Roettcher in 1964 and joined the 1965 civil rights march from Montgomery to Selma led by Martin Luther King. Appropriately perhaps, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977) was his major work. Again, he was less interested in the leadership; folk thought and culture became its subject. Similarly, his remarkable study of spirituals showed how Jesus was ubiquitous in them, but "it was not invariably the Jesus of the New Testament of whom the slaves sang, but frequently a Jesus transformed into an Old Testament warrior" - on a white horse, sword in hand.

They "sang songs, told stories, played verbal games, listened and responded to sermons, and expressed their aspirations, fears and values through the same medium of an oral tradition that had characterised the west African cultures from which their ancestors had come. By largely ignoring this tradition, much of which has been preserved, historians have rendered an articulate people historically inarticulate."

Levine's later book, The Unpredictable Past (1993), showed that Shakespeare suffused minstrel shows which wittily parodied him - "All the world's a bar/ And all the men and women mainly drinkers." People enjoyed Shakespeare, mangled or otherwise. In May 1849 two very different, rival stagings of Macbeth in New York so polarised audiences that a riot erupted outside: this audience participation left 22 dead. Levine pointed out that opera houses could be equally turbulent. When singer Adelina Patti altered Handel to show her great range, conductor Theodore Thomas declared, "Excuse me, madam, but here I am the prima donna."

Levine chronicled the subsequent emergence of America's patrician cultural hierarchy in Highbrow and Lowbrow (1988). The conductor Leopold Stokowski even sought a referendum on applause, saying that if nobody cheers a prayer, the afterglow of a Chopin nocturne should go undisturbed: applause was "a relic of the dark ages".

Levine also sought to counter claims in the late 1980s that American universities had degenerated. As he wrote, Eve Sedgwick's 1989 paper, Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, was among the "most heavily cited and least read scholarly papers in history". Such people as Allan Bloom and Lynne Cheney echoed Roger Kimball's slur about "tenured radicals", and Saul Bellow asked, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read them." As Levine retorted, this showed "the limits of his education".

He cited Henry Adams' dismay with Harvard from 1854 to 1859, and reminded his readers that America's 20th-century "western civ" courses were a first world war "government initiative, and its heyday lasted for scarcely 50 years". Levine revelled in his country's diverse character and "particularly intricate society", and urged scholars to be equally diverse and intricate in their approaches to its history. For him, Big Bill Broonzy summed it up well: "All music's gotta be folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing."

He is survived by his wife, with whom he wrote The People and the President: America's Conversations with FDR (2002), after retiring in 1994.

· Lawrence William Levine, cultural historian, born February 17 1933; died October 23 2006

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