George E. Mowry

George Edwin Mowry
Born	September 5, 1909 Washington D.C., U.S.
Died	May 12, 1984
Alma mater	Miami University University of Wisconsin–Madison
Occupation	Historian
Parent(s)	James Reilly Mowry Ibby Green

George Edwin Mowry (September 5, 1909 in Washington D.C. – May 12, 1984) was an American historian focusing primarily on the Progressive Era. As a professor at UCLA and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he taught large classes and directed over 50 PhD dissertations. Mowry published five books, co-authored six others and edited three books. He published 10 book chapters, over 50 encyclopedia articles and over 100 book reviews in magazines and professional journals. He joined John Donald Hicks as coauthor of a highly successful university textbook. He was active in many organizations, especially the Organization of American Historians. His interpretation of the middle class foundation of the Progressive Era remains influential.

Mowry was born in Washington D.C., the son of James Reilly Mowry and Ibby (Green) Mowry. He grew up in Ohio, attending high school and graduating from Miami University in 1933. Teachers in high school and college exposed him to the Populist Movement, causing him to enroll at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to work with John Donald Hicks for his master's degree (1934) and doctorate (1938). Historian Keith M. Heim believes that Mowry's Midwestern background and personality influenced his interest in reform movements. Heim says Mowry showed a "disdain for elites and social pretense" and an "impatience with bureaucracies". In 1937 Mowry married La Verne Raasch a fellow graduate student majoring in English.

Mowry taught thousands of undergraduates and mentored over fifty doctoral students in his career. He allowed graduate students to "make their own decisions and use my own intervention as little as possible in making those decisions.". He worked vigorously with his students when they were selecting their dissertation topics to urge them to select something "significant" but also allowed students to select topics that could succeed without intrusive supervision. His own mentor, John D. Hicks had played a similar role for Mowry and encouraged him to not write on a second rate figure but rather to find a "big subject." When Mowry suggested the Progressive Movement, Hicks said "Fine, go ahead. That's big enough!" Mowry's first teaching position was as an instructor then an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1938-1942. During World War II (1942-1944) he worked as a policy analyst for the Army Quartermaster Corps and then for the War Production Board.Mills College in California invited Mowry to become their May Treat Morrison Professor of American History. He taught there from fall 1944 to 1947 and also published Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (1946) and did most of the research for his next book The California Progressives (1951). He left California for a professorship at the University of Iowa but in 1950 he returned to California this time as a full professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. He served as professor, department chair, (1955-1967) and also Dean of the Division of Social Sciences (1959-1967). He wrote The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (1958) and The Urban Nation (1965) and co-authored three additional books while at UCLA. He was invited as a visiting professor to the University of Strasbourg (1950-1951), University of Rennes (1951), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1953-1954), University of Marseilles, Nice, (1958), University of California at Berkeley, Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) and Columbia University. He lectured in Italy, Japan, and India, and served as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University in 1960–1961. He returned to Chapel Hill in 1967 as the William Rand Kenan Professor of History. He wrote Another Look at the Twentieth-Century South (1973).

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