Name Carl Degler | Role Historian | |
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Education Columbia University (1952) Awards Pulitzer Prize for History, Bancroft Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Nominations National Book Award for History (Paperback) Books Out of Our Past: The Forces th, Neither Black nor White, In Search of Human Nature: T, At Odds: Women and the F, Place over time | ||
Carl Neumann Degler (February 6, 1921 in Newark, New Jersey – December 27, 2014 in Palo Alto, California) was a United States historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He was the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University.
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Early life and education
Degler was born New Jersey. He served in the U.S. Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945. He earned a BA in history from Upsala College, and master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University.
Career
Degler taught history at Vassar College for 16 years (1952–1968). In 1968 he joined the Stanford faculty and taught there for the rest of his career, retiring as Emeritus Professor in 1990. In 1986 Degler was elected President of the American Historical Association. He also served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association.
In 1972 Degler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Neither Black nor White (1971), a work comparing slavery and race relations in Brazil and the United States. He earlier wrote Out of Our Past (1959), a study of United States history that is currently used in high school and college classrooms and study chambers throughout the United States.
He has been described as "a scholarly champion of the common man and woman in American history" and as "a founding feminist". He was one of only two male founding members of the National Organization for Women.
In 1973-1974 he was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.
Personal life
Degler was married to Catherine Grady, whom he met at Columbia, for nearly 50 years until her death. He was married to Teresa Baker Degler for the last 14 years of his life. He had two children and four grandchildren.
He died in Palo Alto, California on December 27, 2014 at the age of 93.