Memory and History

Memory and History, the second volume of historian Rod Stackelberg's autobiography, picks up his personal and professional reminiscences where his first volume, Out of Hitler's Shadow (2010), left off. After teaching high school in northern Vermont, Stackelberg belatedly resumed his graduate training in pursuit of a college teaching career. He resumes his graduate education at the Universities of Vermont and Massachusetts, Amherst, earning a PhD in modern European history in 1974-a full eighteen years after earning his BA at Harvard University.

It was not a good time to enter the academic job market, as indeed he had been forewarned by his instructors as early as 1970. Several chapters of Memory and History deal with the trials and tribulations of job-hunting in the unfavorable academic employment climate of the 1970s. He ultimately attained his goal of pursuing a college teaching career, ultimately teaching at San Diego State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of South Dakota before joining the history department at Gonzaga University, retiring after more than a quarter-century at Gonzaga in 2004.

This continuation of Stackelberg's life story shares details of history and of academic life-both his own and of more general problems and conflicts in that sphere in the late twentieth century.