Claim: Handlin, the director of numerous Ph.D. dissertations at Cambridge University, was a key pioneer and supporter of ethnic historiography, he sponsored one published by Harvard University Press in 1980 that received widespread media attention because it coincided with an American interest in their roots.
Evidence: As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration history in the 1950s.