Thomas Childers
Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History
Thomas Childers was born and raised in East Tennessee. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Tennessee, and earned his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1976.
Since 1976, Professor Childers has taught in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Research Grant, a fellowship in European Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a West European Studies Research Grant from Harvard University.
During his tenure at Penn, Professor Childers has won a number of awards for his work in the classroom, including the Ira T. Abrahms Award for Distinguished Teaching and Challenging Teaching in the Arts and Sciences (1987), the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching in History (1999), and the Senior Class Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2000). The recipient of the Senior Class Award is chosen by the entire graduating class of the University of Pennsylvania.
In addition to teaching at University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Childers has held visiting professorships at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, Smith College, and Swarthmore College, and he has lectured in London, Oxford, Berlin, Munich, and other universities in the United States and Europe.
Graduate courses he has offered are War and Society in the Twentieth Century; The Second World War; The Third Reich; Narrative and Historical Writing; and Culture and Politics in Germany, 1871-1933.
Professor Childers is the author and editor of several books on modern German history and the Second World War. These include The Nazi Voter (Chapel Hill, 1983), The Formation of the Nazi Constituency, (London, 1987) and Reevaluating the Third Reich: New Controversies, New Interpretations (New York, 1993). He is currently completing a trilogy on the Second World War. The first volume of that history, Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1995), was praised by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post as "a powerful and unselfconsciously beautiful book." The second volume, We'll Meet Again (New York: Henry Holt and Company) was published in 1999 and is set in wartime Germany, France, Britain and the United States. The final volume, The Best Years of Their Lives, examines the difficulties of veterans returning home from the Second World War and will follow in due course.
Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)
For current course listings, consult the Course Directory.
- HIST 202 War and Society in the 20th Century
- HIST 212 History and Literature
- HIST 430 The Third Reich
- HIST 431 The World at War
- HIST 630 Narrative & Historical Writing
