Thomas Childers

Thomas Childers is a historian and teacher in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania since 1976[1] and retired April 25, 2017 as Professor Emeritus.[2]

Childers was born in Tennessee where he was raised and later attended the University of Tennessee where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees. He gained his PH.D. in History in 1976 from Harvard University. Dr. Childers focuses much of his expertise on War and Society in the Twentieth Century and World War I and II.

He has received several teaching awards including the Ira T. Abrahms Award in 1987 for Distinguish Teaching and Challenging Teaching in the Arts and Sciences, and the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching in History. While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Dr. Childers has taken many Visiting Professorships at well-known colleges such as the University of Cambridge, Swarthmore College, and Trinity Hall College. He has also done many lectures throughout the world in places like Oxford, Berlin, Munich, and London. Dr. Childers's work has been talked about by other historians. Some of those acknowledgements can be found in the book Historiography in the Twentieth Century from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge written by Georg G. Iggers. For example, Iggers states “Thomas Childers concentrates more directly on language.” (Iggers 1997)

Childers has lectured on four of The Great Courses series.