Background

David M. Oshinsky was born in 1944.

Education

Oshinsky graduated from Cornell University in 1967 and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from Brandeis University in 1971.

Career

Noted by critics and peers for his scholarship and his restrained, balanced treatment of his subject matter, historian David M. Oshinsky has written about a number of phenomena of twentieth-century America, including one that took place at the university where he taught history, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

In 1935 Friedrich J. Hauptmann, chairman of the Department of German at Rutgers, denied tenure to Dienhard Bergel, an instructor who had recently emigrated from Europe. Bergel charged that he had been blacklisted for political reasons by Hauptmann, who was sympathetic to the Nazi Party then in control of Germany. (Five years later, just before the United States entered World War II against Hitler, Hauptmann renamed to Nazi Germany.)

Fifty years after the denial of Bergel’s tenure, New York and New Jersey newspaper stories resurrected the subject. As a result, Rutgers’ administration commissioned history professors David M. Oshinsky, Richard P. McCormick, and Daniel Horn to investigate Bergel’s charges, and they produced The Case of the Nazi Professor in 1989. The authors concluded that the denial of tenure was not politically motivated, but was based on clearly defined professional criteria; nonetheless, they wrote, in the situation Rutgers’ chief interest had been not justice, but "to protect the university from unfavorable publicity."

In the other two books Oshinsky examined the career of Joseph McCarthy, the anti-communist Republican senator from Wisconsin whose name is most closely associated with hearings by the House Un-American activities committee into alleged Communist activity during the 1950s.

Oshinsky attracted more attention for "Worse than Slavery Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice." Parchman Farm was a twenty thousand acre prison work camp in Mississippi during the early part of the twentieth century, established ostensibly as a corrective to the controversial practice of "convict leasing." The latter, a policy that prevailed for many years, had amounted to the state renting out the labor of convicts to private companies, and seemed much like slavery to critics of the practice. Because of the racial politics of Mississippi, which had seen a particularly vehement reaction to defeat in the Civil War, Parchman Farm turned out to be no improvement over the convict leasing system. Instead, it became a place where black prisoners were singled out and subjected to extremely hard labor, beatings, and other cruel conditions.

All in all, David wrote eight books. His latest book Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital was published in 2016. His articles and reviews appear regularly in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

David Oshinsky held the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, he is the director of the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU School of Medicine and a professor in the Department of History at New York University.

Achievements

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  David Oshinsky is an accomplished American historian and writer. His book A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy won the Hardeman Prize for the best book about the U.S. Congress, and the book Worse Than Slavery won the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for distinguished contribution to human rights. David also won both the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Hoover Presidential Book Award for the book Polio: An American Story.
  
  In 2009, PBS aired a documentary based upon his book Polio: An American Story, and he received the Dean's Medal from the Bloomberg-Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for his distinguished contributions to the field.

Works

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  • Capital Punishment on Trial

    (In his first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio:...)

    2010
  • Worse Than Slavery

    (In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, an...)

    1996
  • Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement

    (The book describes the efforts of organized labor to comb...)

    1971
  • Polio: An American Story

    (Here David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio...)

    2005
  • Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital

    (From its origins in 1738 as an almshouse and pesthouse, B...)

    2016
  • A Conspiracy So Immense

    (Here, David Oshinsky presents us with a work heralded as ...)

    1983
  • Case of the Nazi Professor 1989