Lawrence W. Levine; Altered History Research

Lawrence W. Levine, 73, a historian who challenged the boundaries of traditional historical method in an effort to understand the diversity of America's past, died of cancer Oct. 23 at his home in Berkeley, Calif.

A prolific writer and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, he was a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley for more than three decades and at George Mason University from 1994 until his death. He taught there every fall semester from 1994 to 2005 and lived in the District. He lived in Berkeley the rest of the year.

Dr. Levine called his forays into intellectual history "the history not of thought but of men thinking."

In his best-known work, "Black Culture and Black Consciousness" (1977), he explored songs, folk tales, proverbs, aphorisms, jokes, verbal games and "the long narrative oral poems known in Afro-American culture as 'toasts.' "

"He was able to recapture the lives of people who expressed themselves in many ways but not in ways that historians had been accustomed to recording," said Leon F. Litwack, a historian, friend and former colleague at Berkeley.

"Working-class people had been ignored," Litwack added, "because historians had thought they were inarticulate. Levine challenged that, and challenged it successfully."

Litwack noted that when the book came out, Dr. Levine was disappointed that it attracted relatively little attention by the mainstream press. Litwack said he assured his colleague that at meetings of professional historians the book was a hot topic of discussion.

"That book reshaped American history," Litwack said. "It forced us to rethink and redocument the past."

Robert Abzug, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, said Dr. Levine's "writings on African American culture and the history of popular culture in America will endure as models of how to challenge the limitations of discipline and accepted wisdom in any field."

Lawrence William Levine was born Feb. 27, 1933, in New York City, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish father and a Russian Jewish mother. He told Litwack that his interest in listening to the voices of the undocumented could be traced in part to his awareness of the stories his parents had to tell, stories a traditional historian would have disdained.

He graduated with a history degree from the City University of New York in 1955. He received a master's degree in 1957 and a doctorate in 1962, both in history, from Columbia University. His first book, a study of William Jennings Bryan, was published in 1965.

In 1962, he joined the history department at Berkeley, where he not only taught but also plunged into the occasionally raucous political life of the campus. He supported Berkeley students during the Free Speech Movement of the early 1960s and joined in sit-ins the Congress of Racial Equality organized to force local businesses to hire blacks. He also marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965.

After winning the MacArthur grant in 1983, he continued to write books that expanded traditional approaches to the past, including "Highbrow/Lowbrow" (1988) and "The Unpredictable Past" (1993).

"The Opening of the American Mind" (1996) was a spirited defense of multiculturalism and an answer, of sorts, to Allan Bloom's bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987). In a 1997 interview with Sheldon Hackney, then-chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dr. Levine accused Bloom of being afraid of the proliferation of new ideas in the American university.

"What I've done is to agree with Mr. Bloom that the university is open as it has never been before, but I see that as a good thing," he said.

Dr. Levine went to George Mason after taking early retirement from Berkeley in 1994. According to Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor at George Mason, he had come to love Washington while doing research at the Library of Congress. When he inquired at the university about an arrangement that would allow him to continue teaching, it was eager to oblige.

"He loved teaching at George Mason University," Rosenzweig said. "He may have been a superstar, but he took the job incredibly seriously. He attended every department meeting, advised a million students. It worked out fabulously for us."

At the time of his death, he was working on a book about the culture of the 1930s.

Survivors include his wife of 42 years, Cornelia Roettcher Levine of Berkeley, with whom he wrote "The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR" (2002); two sons, Joshua Levine and Isaac Levine, both of Berkeley; a stepson, Alexander Pimentel of Richmond, Calif.; a sister; and three grandchildren.