Talk:William Chafe

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Career

Professor Chafe received his A.B. from Harvard in 1962, and his PhD from Columbia University in 1971. One of a new generation of women's historians, he published his dissertation in 1972, titled The American Woman: Her Social, Political and Economic Roles, 1920-1970. Chafe's research interests focus on gender and racial equality, and modern political history. His publications include: Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal (2012); The Rise and Fall of the American Century: The United States from 1890 to 2008 (2008); The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (8th edition, 2014); Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern America (2005; Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (1993); The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century (1991); Remembering Jim Crow (2002), with Robert Korstad and Raymond Gavins; Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1980); Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture (1977).[1]

Civilities and Civil Rights won the First Annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1981, given to an author who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes -- his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for for honest and even-handled justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity." [2] Chafe won the Sydney Hillman book award in 1994 for Never Stop Running, his biography of Allard Lowenstein; and the Lillian Smith Award in 2002 for Remembering Jim Crow, co-authored with Robert Korstad and Raymond Gavins.

In 1972, Chafe started the Duke Oral History program with Lawrence Goodwyn, a program that, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, recruited graduate students to conduct oral histories with grass roots activists in black America. That program led to the creation of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Race Relations in 1976, which, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, attracted scholars and graduate students to Duke University. Chafe also directed the Duke-UNC Center for Research on Women, supported by the Ford Foundation, during the 1980s. The oral history program continued and then merged in 1989 with the newly created Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). One of the founders of the Center, Chafe remains deeply involved with it work, including ongoing oral histories with black Americans. In partnership with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Legacy Project, CDS and SNCC have just completed a five e year project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to recover oral histories and archives from SNCC veterans. Since 1972, 45 graduate students who have used oral history as a primary vehicle for researching black activism have received Ph.D's from Duke. Twenty-eight of these have published their dissertations, with eighteen being awarded national book prizes.

Chafe became Chair of the history department in 1995, and then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Duke from 1995-2004. While Dean, he increased the number of black faculty by 133 per cent. In his role as Dean he supervised undergraduate admissions, and during his deanship, the proportion of Duke undergraduates who were non-white rose from 15 per cent to 35 per cent.(The proportion is now 53 per cent).

In recognition of his record as an historian, Chafe was elected President of the Organization of American Historians in 1999-2000.

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