Ronald Edsforth

Ron Edsforth is currently a Research Associate in History and Professor of Globalization Studies in the Masters in Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program at Dartmouth College. He taught American history at Michigan State University, Skidmore College, Hamilton College, and MIT before coming to Dartmouth in 1993. He is most recently the General Editor of A Cultural History of Peace: Antiquity to the Modern Age, a six volume collection of original scholarly essays published by Bloomsbury in March 2020.  Ron is also the editor and contributor to Volume Six: A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age.   As a young historian Ron wrote extensively on the economic development and politics of the United States.  Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus (1987) stressed the significance of the automobile in the making of our nation’s extraordinary consumer economy and its impact on political culture.  Ron co-edited two essay collections, Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America (1991) and Autowork (1995) that amplified these themes.  He was also chief historian for the PBS documentary film America on Wheels (1996).  In 2000 Ron published his last book in the field of American history, The New Deal: America's Response to the Great Depression.  Since then Ron's scholarly work has been influenced by his teaching roles as Dartmouth's first coordinator of War and Peace Studies (1998-2004) and Chair of Globalization Studies MALS (2006-2016).  Working as a peace historian in this century, Ron has presented papers and published essays on the global diffusion of nonviolent revolution, the global political implications of neoliberalism, and representations of peace and war in global media.  He is currently completing research for a book about the early history of the global NGO Save the Children.