Barbara Lee Bloom

Background

Barbara Lee Bloom was born on April 11, 1943, in Long Beach, California, United States. She is the daughter of Verdon Bradley and Shirley Andrews.

Education

Barbara Bloom began her studies at the University of California, Los Angeles where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Then she went to California State University, Long Beach, and obtained a Master of Arts degree. She also got a Doctor of Education degree at the University of Vermont.

Career

Barbara Bloom began her teaching career in 1980 as an assistant professor of history at Champlain College becoming a professor in 1990. She taught courses in American and world history. She was the director of the international exchange program at the college. She also developed, with others, a multicultural curriculum for grades five through twelve. During her career at Champlain College, Bloom also served at Vermont Governor's Institute faculty in summers from 1982 to 1985. In 1997, she was a visiting professor at the Universidad Regiomontana in Monterrey, Mexico. Since 2004, Barbara Bloom has been a professor emeritus at Champlain College.

Writer and historian, Barbara Lee Bloom, relies on the techniques of both fiction and nonfiction to examine historical subjects. She wrote her first book when she was ten years old. Since then, she has continued to love to do research and to learn about far-away places. She traveled a great deal in Europe and Latin America.

As a historian, she is careful about getting the facts and writing as accurately as possible about what she's discovered. Her writings include historical fiction, biography, and historical nonfiction. Bloom is the author of factually accurate but fictionalized accounts of history in books such as Exploring Historical Fiction. Her story "Ain't I a Woman?" concerns Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an evangelist, speaker, abolitionist, and women's rights crusader in the United States during the middle 1800s.

In her two nonfiction books, The Chinese Americans and The Mexican Americans, Bloom describes in detail the reasons and results of Chinese and Mexican immigration to the United States. The books explore why the immigrants left their home countries, the types of work they undertook in the United States, the problems and prejudices they encountered, and their struggles and victories in making a new life in a new and sometimes dramatically unfamiliar country. The book, The Chinese Americans, pays special attention to Chinese immigrants in Hawaii, with a separate chapter on their lives in this United States island state.

Achievements

• Barbara Bloom is an outstanding historian known for her research in the field of immigration. Her books on this theme received much appreciation. She is considered to be a gifted educator who is professor emeritus at Champlain College. In recognition of her work, she became the recipient of the University Scholars Fellowship from Rotary International (1997).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Mexican Americans

    (The Mexican Americans reviews the reasons why Mexicans ha...)

    2004
  • The Chinese Americans

    (The Chinese Americans discusses the reasons for emigratio...)

    2002
  • The Organization of American States

    (The Organization of American States focuses on the world'...)

    2008
  • Nat Love

    (Nat Love recounts the life of Nat Love, the former slave ...)

    2010

Views

Quotations: "I know the importance of telling the story as accurately as possible, but as a professor of history, I know the importance of finding the interesting details of the past to interest my students."

Membership

Barbara Lee Bloom is a member of Vermont Sierra Club, National Council of the Social Sciences, and Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.

Interests

• reading, hiking

• Sport & Clubs

  running, biking, skiing

Connections

Barbara Lee Bloom is married to Thomas K. Bloom. The couple has two children, Heidi and Heather.

Father:

Verdon Bradley

Mother:

Shirley Andrews

husband:

Thomas K. Bloom