Princeton University

Dan Rodgers, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, is an historian of American ideas and culture who has taught at Princeton since 1980. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Yale University (1973) after graduating from Brown University (1965). He is the author of three books: The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (1978), winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize; Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics (1987); and Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), which won the American Historical Association’s Beer Prize and the Organization of American Historians’s Hawley Prize. His articles run the gamut from American exceptionalism, to the career of ‘republicanism,’ to the election of 2000. He has held fellowships from the NEH, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and has served as a member of the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. He was chair of the History Department from 1988 to 1995 and organizer of its summer workshops for public and parochial school history teachers. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in Germany and Japan and the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

 

Professor Rodgers is currently at work on a history of social ideas in 1980s America.

 

 

Professor Rodgers teaches graduate seminars in American cultural and intellectual history; U.S. history in comparative and transnational perspectives; U.S. history from 1877 to 1920; and U.S. history since 1920. His graduate student advisees work on subjects across a wide chronological and methodological range. Their current projects include the origins of the "obesity" panic, the idea of "attention" in psychology and advertising, the packaging and selling of the birth control pill, and uses of science and mathematics in the life insurance industry. At the undergraduate level he teaches a lecture course in modern American cultural history; a widely imitated documents immersion course for sophomores (History 280); and (from time to time) seminars in the history of poverty and the 1980s.