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Thomas Childers Jr. (born 1946) [1] is an American historian and lecturer. He was hired by the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 [2] and in 2017 the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History Emeritus. [3]
Childers was born and raised in Cleveland, Tennessee. [4] He later attended the University of Tennessee where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees. He gained his Ph.D. in History in 1976 from Harvard University. [4] Much of Childers work focuses on war and society in the twentieth century, particularly World War I and II. His father and uncle both fought in World War II; his uncle was killed in action, and although Childers's father survived, the family still struggled to reunite after his return. [1] This greatly impacted his childhood and influenced his 2009 book about the experiences of American veterans after the war, [1] Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II.
He has received several teaching awards including the Ira T. Abrahms Award in 1987 for Distinguish Teaching and Challenging Teaching in the Arts and Sciences, and the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching in History. While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Dr. Childers has taken many Visiting Professorships at well-known colleges such as the University of Cambridge, Swarthmore College, and Trinity Hall College. He has also done many lectures throughout the world in places like Oxford, Berlin, Munich, and London. Dr. Childers's work has been talked about by other historians. Some of those acknowledgements can be found in the book Historiography in the Twentieth Century from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge written by Georg G. Iggers. For example, Iggers states "Thomas Childers concentrates more directly on language." (Iggers 1997)
Childers has lectured on four of The Great Courses series. As of 2007 [update] , he lives in Media, Pennsylvania. [1]
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A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. Some historians are recognized by publications or training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere.
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party, existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric; it was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression, when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.
Pan-Germanism, also occasionally known as Pan-Germanicism, is a pan-nationalist political idea. Pan-Germanists originally sought to unify all the German-speaking people – and possibly also non-German Germanic-speaking peoples – in a single nation-state known as the Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation.
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and led Amt Rosenberg, an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941–1945). After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He was sentenced to death by hanging and executed on 16 October 1946.
Diplomatic history deals with the history of international relations between states. Diplomatic history can be different from international relations in that the former can concern itself with the foreign policy of one state while the latter deals with relations between two or more states. Diplomatic history tends to be more concerned with the history of diplomacy, but international relations concern more with current events and creating a model intended to shed explanatory light on international politics.
Leopold von Ranke was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history. He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of historical documents. Building on the methods of the Göttingen School of History, he was the first to establish a historical seminar. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources (empiricism), an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics (Außenpolitik). He was ennobled in 1865, with the addition of a "von" to his name.
The Masurians or Mazurs, historically also known as Prussian Masurians, are an ethnic group originating from the region of Masuria, within the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, Poland. They number around 5,000–15,000 people. In the 2011 Polish census, 1,376 individuals declared themselves to be Masurian as either a first or a secondary identification. Before World War II and its post-war expulsions, Masurians used to be a more numerous ethnic group found in the southern parts of East Prussia for centuries following the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Today, most Masurians live in what is now Germany and elsewhere.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is a book by American journalist William L. Shirer in which the author chronicles the rise and fall of Nazi Germany from the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1889 to the end of World War II in Europe in 1945. It was first published in 1960 by Simon & Schuster in the United States. It was a bestseller in both the United States and Europe, and a critical success outside Germany; in Germany, criticism of the book stimulated sales. The book was feted by journalists, as reflected by its receipt of the National Book Award for non-fiction, but the reception from academic historians was mixed.
Louis Leo Snyder was an American scholar, who witnessed first hand the Nazi mass rallies held from 1923 on in Germany; and wrote about them from New York in his Hitlerism: The Iron Fist in Germany published in 1932 under the pseudonym Nordicus. Snyder predicted Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Nazi alliance with Benito Mussolini, and possibly the war upon the French and the Jews. His book was the first publication of the complete NSDAP National Socialist Program in the English language.
The association of Nazism with occultism occurs in a wide range of theories, speculation, and research into the origins of Nazism and into Nazism's possible relationship with various occult traditions.
Bernhard Rust was Minister of Science, Education and National Culture (Reichserziehungsminister) in Nazi Germany. A combination of school administrator and zealous Nazi, he issued decrees, often bizarre, at every level of the German educational system to immerse German youth in Nazi ideology. He also served as the party Gauleiter in Hanover and Brunswick from 1925 to 1940.
Gerhard Georg Bernhard Ritter was a nationalist-conservative German historian who served as a professor of history at the University of Freiburg from 1925 to 1956. He studied under Professor Hermann Oncken. A Lutheran, he first became well known for his 1925 biography of Martin Luther and hagiographic portrayal of Prussia. A member of the German People's Party during the Weimar Republic, he was a lifelong monarchist and remained sympathetic to the political system of the defunct German Empire.
Hans Rothfels was a German nationalist conservative historian. He supported an idea of authoritarian German state, dominance of Germany over Europe and was hostile to Germany's eastern neighbours. After his applications for honorary Aryan status were rejected, due to his Jewish ancestry and increased persecution of Jewish people by Nazis, he was forced to emigrate to the United Kingdom and later to the United States during the Second World War, after which he became opposed to the Nazi regime. Rothfels returned to West Germany after 1945 where he continued to influence history teaching and became an influential figure among West German scholars.
The Myth of the Twentieth Century is a 1930 book by Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist and official who was convicted of crimes against humanity and other crimes at the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946. Rosenberg was one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi Party and editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1941, history professor Peter Viereck wrote: "In molding Germany's 'psychology of frightfulness' Rosenberg wields an influence as powerful as that of the much publicized Goebbels and the much feared Himmler and his secret police."
The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political life, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards Christianity. Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations. He also criticized atheism.
Werner Conze was a German historian. Georg Iggers refers to him as "one of the most important historians and mentors of the post-1945 generation of West German historians." Beginning in 1998, Conze's role during the Third Reich and his successful postwar career in spite of this became a subject of great controversy among German historians.
Steven F. Sage is a scholar and former American diplomat who has written on ancient China and on 20th-century Europe. He is an author of two books Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China (1992) and Ibsen and Hitler (2006). He is currently working on books on the Holocaust in Bulgaria and on the building of the Reichsautobahn.
Nazism, the common name in English for National Socialism, is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War.
The historiography of Germany deals with the manner in which historians have depicted, analyzed and debated the history of Germany. It also covers the popular memory of critical historical events, ideas and leaders, as well as the depiction of those events in museums, monuments, reenactments, pageants and historic sites, and the editing of historical documents.
Georg Gerson Iggers was an American historian of modern Europe, historiography, and European intellectual history.
