Gary McElhany person
Brian Farmer person
Dr. Brian R. Farmer received his PhD from Texas
Tech University in 1996 and has been teaching on the
college level since 1991. He is the author of numerous
books and articles, including The Question of
Dependency and Economic Development (Lexington
Books, 1999), American Political Ideologies (McFarland
Press, 2005), American Conservatism: History, Theory
and Practice (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006),
Understanding Radical Islam (Peter Lang Publishing,
2007), and Radical Islam in the West (McFarland
Press, 2011). Dr. Farmer is currently a professor of
social sciences at Wayland Baptist University.
Vincent De Santis person
Vincent P. De Santis, late professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame, earned a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University and became a specialist in American political history and the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. De Santis joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1949 and spent his entire academic career there. De Santis authored such influential books as Republicans Face the Southern Question and The Shaping of Modern America: 1877-1916, and was a contributor to the textbook, The Democratic Experience. Officially retiring in 1982, he continued to write and teach a course on "American Presidents from FDR to Clinton" until his passing in 2011.
Carl Degler person
Carl Degler was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1921 and educated in the public schools of
New Jersey. He earned his BA in history at Upsala College in 1942, served in the U.S. Army Air
Forces from 1942–1945, received his MA in 1947, and his PhD in 1952 from Columbia University.
Moving from an instructor to a professor at Vassar College (1952–1968), he joined the faculty of
Stanford University in 1968 and was named the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History in
1972. He became an emeritus in 1990. Degler also served as a visiting professor at the Columbia
University graduate school (1963–1964) and as Harmsworth Professor of American History, Oxford
University, 1973–1974.
His principal publications include the following: Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped
Modern America (New York, 1959; 2nd revised ed., 1984); The Age of the Economic Revolution
(Chicago, 1967, rev. ed., 1977); Affluence and Anxiety (Chicago, 1968, rev. ed., 1975); Neither Black
Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971); The Other
South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York 1974, Gainesville, FL, 2000); Place
Over Time the Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge, LA 1977); At Odds: Women and
the Family from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980); In Search of Human Nature: the
Fall and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York, 1991). Degler also edited
Pivotal Interpretations in American History (2 vols., 1966) and The New Deal (Chicago, 1970). He
wrote an introduction to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (New
York, 1966). He also published seventy-five articles and more than one hundred book reviews.
Neither Black Nor White won the Pulitzer Prize in History, 1972; the Bancroft Prize of
Columbia University; and the Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association. In Search
of Human Nature was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize by Phi Beta Kappa in 1991. Degler received the Dean’s Award for Teaching in 1979 and honorary degrees from Oxford University,
Colgate University, Ripon College, and Upsala College.
Carl Degler served as president of the Pacific Coast branch of the American Historical
Association (1974–1975), president of the Organization of American Historians (1978–1979),
president of the Southern Historical Association, and president of the American Historical
Association (1985–1986).
He was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1964–1965), the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation (1972–1973), the National Endowment of the Humanities (1976–1977
and 1983–1984), and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1979–1980).
Degler was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American
Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Society of American Historians.
Dr. Degler’s life and career came to a close upon his death in 2014.
