I grew up in the suburbs of New York City and attended a small liberal arts college in upstate New York (Houghton College). Later I did graduate work at Michigan State University where I earned both my M.A. and Ph.D. My dissertation was on seventeenth-century Puritanism and the influence the New England Way of church polity had on the Puritans in the mother country during the English Civil Wars and Commonwealth period. Research for the dis-sertation took me to England where I spent most of my time in the reading room of the British Museum (where George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and innumerable others did some of their best work) examining seventeenth-century pamphlets and letters. I also did research at the Guildhall Library, the Dr. Williams’s Library, and at Cambridge University.After receiving my Ph.D., I returned to London where I taught for a time at the University of London and then later moved to Germany where I taught at Bremen University for over four years.When I returned to the United States there were very few history teaching positions available and I wound up managing a second-hand bookshop in Philadelphia for the next fourteen years. During this time I also began writing fiction. One of the novels I wrote was published and won a prize for suspense fiction in Japan (The Suntory Prize).

Throughout most of this time I missed teaching, but figured that I was too much out-of-the-loop of academia ever to find a full-time job. In 1996, however, I began teaching part-time as an adjunct professor at Penn State University and very quickly found myself in demand at many local institutions in Philadelphia. For four years I taught history at Penn State, Community College of Philadelphia, Widener University, and Temple University. In 2000, on the basis of very good student evaluations, Temple University hired me full-time. At Temple I teach U.S. History, Intellectual Heritage, and a course that I developed, Dissent in America. In 2002 I was named “Temple University Honors Professor of the Year” and in 2003 “Temple University Intellectual Heritage Professor of the Year.”Along with my teaching and research I have also been leading (since 2001) weekly teach-ins. These grew out of my Dissent in America class when students refused to leave at the end of the class period and persistently sat around discussing the issues that were raised in class that day. After awhile we decided to open up these Friday afternoon post-class discussions to anyone who wanted to attend. It is amazing, but they’re still going strong after five years even though all the students that helped me start the teach-ins have graduated and moved on. The purpose of the teach-ins is to examine the historical back-ground of contemporary issues. For example we’ve had teach-ins about dissenters of the past like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, protest music, the origins of modern terrorism, U.S. policy in the Middle East, the Iran hostage crisis, Israel’s conflicts with Palestine and Lebanon, the Patriot Act, NAFTA and the FTAA, Teach for America, as well as gender and race issues. In addition a couple of former students who did tours of duty in Iraq have led teach-ins on their experience there.

My book, Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation, is a collection of my essays and primary sources dealing with the subject of dissent. My thesis is that dissent is central to American history. In fact, dissent is one of the defining characteristics of the United States. This country was founded by dissenters and dissent itself is ensconced in our founding documents. In fact the United States is the first nation founded on the notion that the people have the right to speak out and protest if they believe that their rights are being ignored or suppressed. People who have protested against the status quo invariably quote from the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution when they implore the U.S. to live up to its own ideals; to live up to what it has put down on paper.

I have been involved with the American Institute of History Education’s Teaching American History grants since November 2004 and I have participated in all fifteen grants AIHE is leading in New Jersey. My lectures on the European Intellectual Roots of the American Revolution (which include such diverse topics as Henry VIII and his six wives, the rise of Puritanism, and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government) as well as those on antebellum America, have been especially popular with the educators participating in the grants.