WMU History Department Celebrates the Career of Professor Ross Gregory
WMU History Department celebrates the career of Professor Ross Gregory
The WMU History Department celebrated the career of Professor Ross Gregory at a retirement dinner held on March 12, 2005.
Prior to joining the History Department at Western Michigan University in 1966, Ross Gregory served in the U.S. Army (Europe), earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. at Indiana University in Bloomington, and served on the faculty at West Virginia Institute of Technology for three years. In his doctoral work, he specialized in the history of American foreign policy, studying with Robert H. Ferrell, a highly regarded American diplomatic historian.
During his thirty-eight years at WMU, Gregory published and taught in the fields of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic history, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. His publishing includes scholarly monographs as well as books for a general audience.
Dr. Gregory’s scholarship has won substantial recognition. His first major work (1970), Walter Hines Page: Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s won the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. Page was U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain on the eve of the First World War. In 2002, the American Council of Learned Societies included the Page study in its “E-Book Project,” designed to preserve “works of unquestioned quality, subject to the rigorous review process currently used in the selection of print books.” His second book, The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War (1971), was a broader interpretive work and remained in print for twenty-six years.
Dr. Gregory’s most recent book Almanacs of American Life: Cold War America 1945-1990 (2003) continues the complex portrait developed in the earlier volume. The Library Journal praised this recent work on the Cold War era as “the best one-volume statistical companion on the subject.”
Dr. Gregory’s teaching at WMU reflects his dual interest and expertise in U.S. foreign policy and in twentieth century U.S. domestic conditions. His courses included U.S. foreign relations, U.S. diplomatic history and the Modern Far East. He has taught all periods of U.S. history from the end of the U.S. Civil War to the present in survey courses, and in more concentrated time periods.
Ross Gregory has provided historical insights to students in all curricula. He has mentored both undergraduate and graduate students, helping them to develop the tools of professional historians for their roles as teachers and scholars.
The very first Ph. D. granted by the department was to one of Gregory’s students, who is now on the faculty at Valdosta State University in Georgia. A scholar and teacher, Ross Gregory’s skills and expertise live on in succeeding generations of scholars and teachers.
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