Hamerow, Theodore Stephen
HAMEROW, THEODORE STEPHEN
HAMEROW, THEODORE STEPHEN (1920– ), U.S. historian. Born in Warsaw, Hamerow spent his childhood in Poland, where his parents were members of the well-known Yiddish theater ensemble, the Vilna Company. He lived in Germany from 1921 to 1924 and then returned to Poland (1924–30). After emigrating to the United States in 1930, he studied at the City College of New York, Columbia University, and Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in 1951. He taught European, particularly German, history at the University of Illinois from 1952 to 1958 and was then appointed professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1958. He conducted research in Germany and was a Fulbright Research Scholar in 1962–63. From 1973 to 1976 he served as chairman of the history department at Wisconsin. Hamerow retired in 1991 as G.P. Gooch Professor of History.
His main studies, relating to 19th and 20th-century Germany, are Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815–1871 (1958); and Otto von Bismarck, a Historical Assessment (1962), which he edited. Other books by Hamerow include The Birth of a New Europe (1983), Reflections on History and Historians (1991), On the Road to the Wolf's Lair: German Resistance to Hitler (1997), and Remembering a Vanished World: A Jewish Childhood in Interwar Poland (2001).
[Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]