Awards

Guggenheim Fellow - 1968

About James T. Patterson

James T. Patterson started his career as part of the Indiana University faculty. Later, he joined the faculty of Brown University, where he retired as the Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus of History after thirty years. His research focused on legal, social, and political history, as well as the history of education, medicine, and race relationships. Patterson is regarded as one of the top scholars on Brown vs. the Board of Education.

Patterson’s books include Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft, and Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy published in 2001.

Patterson was elected a member of the Society of American Historians in 1974, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. He is the recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Book Prize in 1966, and the Indiana University Teaching Award in 1968. Patterson was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships. A number of his books have been History Book Club Selections, and in 1997, he won the Bancroft Prize for American History with his book Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974.