About the Authors

 

David Thelen

Roy Rosenzweig

David Thelen received his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin in 1967 and has taught at the universities of Wisconsin, Missouri (Columbia), Amsterdam, and Indiana (Bloomington). Since 1985 he has been professor of history at Indiana University and editor of the Journal of American History.

His scholarship has focused on attempts by Americans to turn their everyday experiences into means to control their lives. His books include The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885-1900 (1972); Robert La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (1976); Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Democracy in Industrializing Missouri (1986); Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television (1996); and (with Roy Rosenzweig), The Presence of the Past (1998).

He has been interested in the practice of history, particularly in how to bridge gaps between people's personal experiences and professional historical scholarly practice. In particular, he has explored alternatives to professional American practice posedby amateurs in the United States and professionals abroad and lectured onthese subjects in recent years in the US, Britain, Spain, Argentina, Israel, The Netherlands, South Africa, and Australia.

Roy Rosenzweig received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1978 and began teaching at GMU in 1981. He is the co-author of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992); the author of Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City (1983); the co-editor of Experiments in History Teaching (1977); Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (1986); Government and the Arts in Thirties America (1986); and History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (1989); the co-producer of a documentary film, Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston (1979). He has also written articles on the history of film, radicalism, the Great Depression, and leisure as well as on oral history and public history.

For the past decade or so, he has been working to explore the possibilities of new technology and new media for history. Some of those efforts led to the publication of prize-winning multimedia CD-ROM, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (1993) and its forthcoming sequel. The Center for History and New Media at GMU, which he founded and directs, sponsors a number of projects that use the World Wide Web and CD-ROM in teaching presenting the past to a variety of audiences.

 

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