Oberlin College

Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian of the Holocaust. Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1968 and his... doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999, eventually becoming a Distinguished Professor. In 1999, he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to accept an appointment as Frank Porter Graham Professor of History. Browning was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He is best known for his 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a study of German Ordnungspolizei Reserve Unit 101, used to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German occupied Poland in 1942. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the experiments of Stanley Milgram, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty.
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John Harold Kander is the American composer of a number of musicals as part of the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb. Kander was born in Kansas... City, Missouri, the son of Bernice and Harold S. Kander. Kander attended The Pembroke Country-Day School and Oberlin College before earning a Master's degree at Columbia University where he was a protégé of Douglas Moore and studied composition with Jack Beeson. Kander began his Broadway career as substitute rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. The stage manager for West Side Story then asked Kander to play the auditions for her next show, Gypsy. During the auditions, Kander met the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, who suggested that Kander compose the dance music for the show in 1959. After that experience, he wrote dance arrangements for Irma la Douce in 1960. His first produced musical was A Family Affair, written with James and William Goldman. He met lyricist Fred Ebb in 1962 and began a songwriting collaboration that would last for more than four decades. Later that year rising star Barbra Streisand recorded two of the duo's songs, "My Coloring Book" and "I Don't Care Much.
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Michael Byers is an American writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and of the University of Michigan Creative... Writing MFA Program. His first book, The Coast of Good Intentions, is a collection of short stories set in his native Pacific Northwest. His second book , Long for this World, is set in his hometown of Seattle, Washington, and tells the story of a geneticist facing an ethical dilemma that might lead to a cure for a fatal childhood disease. His third book, Percival's Planet, a novel about the discovery of Pluto in 1930, was published in August 2010. Byers is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is married to the poet Susan Hutton.
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Abbott Lowell Cummings is a noted architectural historian and genealogist, best known for his study of New England architecture. He currently lives... in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. Cummings was born in St. Albans, Vermont, educated at the Hoosac School in New York, studied American art and architectural history at Oberlin College, and received his doctoral degree from Ohio State University in 1950. When young, he spent winters with his parents in Bennington, Vermont, and summers with his grandmother in Southington, Connecticut. In an interview with Laura Beech, Cummings reflected on his grandmother's influence: "At a personal level, my grandmother had as much influence as anyone on my life. She was a scientist by training, a Vassar graduate who had studied astronomy. She drilled into me the need to be very factual. I also fell right in with all her genealogical interests." In his teens, Cummings joined the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities , and spent hours at the town clerk's office in Southington, tracing the titles of his ancestors' colonial structures.
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