Carver Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Iowa, Stow Persons is a Connecticut native educated at Yale. After a stint of teaching at Princeton, Persons came to Iowa in 1950 as professor of American history. Among his books are American Minds: A History of Ideas, The Decline of American Gentility, and Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 1905–1045. Following his retirement in 1981 he took up the research for this volume.