Rowland Tappan Berthoff (September 20, 1921 – March 25, 2001) was an American

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...

, working in the fields of immigration and social life in the USA. He is best known for his 1971 book ''An Unsettled People: Order and Disorder in American Life''. He was born in

Toledo, Ohio Toledo ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Lucas County, Ohio, United States. A major Midwestern United States port city, Toledo is the fourth-most populous city in the state of Ohio, after Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, and according ...

, attended

Oberlin College Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. It is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational liberal arts college in the United S ...

, did graduate work at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

where he received a doctorate in 1952, as a student of

Oscar Handlin Oscar Handlin (1915–2011) was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration ...

. Berthoff was an Assistant Professor of History at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

from 1953, and then a professor of history at

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

, from 1962. He was made chairman of Washington University's history department and named William Elliott Smith Professor of History in 1971. He promoted

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

and

ethnic history Ethnic history is a branch of social history that studies ethnic groups and immigrants. Barkan (2007) argues that the field allows historians to use alternate models of interpretation, unite qualitative and quantitative data, apply sociological mod ...

. His 1960 article on "The American Social Order: A Conservative Hypothesis," called for a conservative interpretation of American history.

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