Minor historian and author of several books, currently a professor of
history and
sociology at
New York University, with a joint appointment as adjunct professor of legal history at
NYU Law School.
Books by Cantor include:
The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times
The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews
The Jewish Experience
The Medieval Reader
Medieval Lives
The Civilization of the Middle Ages
Inventing the Middle Ages
The English
Western Civilization: Its Genesis and Destiny
How To Study History (with R.I. Schneider)
Imagining The Law
As evidenced by the titles above, his interests are legal, medieval, English, and Jewish history.
Cantor was born on an isolated and impoverished ranch in Manitoba in the midst of the depression. He received a B.A. from the University of Manitoba and a Ph.D from Princeton, and has since renounced his Canadian citizenship. In the opinion of this noder, Cantor is a decent author, who can write with a bit of flare and humor on his pet topics, but an inadequate lecturer, who may be in the opening stages of senility1. By his own admission, he doesn’t care about his performance, and is interested only in accumulating his considerable salary and "Watching Turner Classic Movies at his big house in Sag Harbor."
Others believe Cantor to be a total hack who is good at marketing himself.
1 Opinion based on Cantor’s one semester ‘History of the Common Law’ course, taken in the spring of 1999, where Imagining The Law served as a textbook.