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Tara Zahra

American historian

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ9355579 ↗
Source-derived summary

Tara Elizabeth Zahra (born August 3, 1976) is an American academic who is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, Zahra received her PhD from the University of Michigan. She has concentrated her studies on sociohistorical models and archival research on family, nation, and ethnicity in the twentieth century leading to an integrative approach across national borders.

Zahra was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014. In 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other awards

2009 Czechoslovak Studies Association Prize

2009 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize

2009 Hans Rosenberg Book Prize

2011 Laura Shannon Prize, Kidnapped Souls

2012 Radomír Luža Prize

2012 George Louis Beer Prize, The Lost Children

Publications

Zahra, Tara (2008). Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801446283. OCLC 164802970.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Tara Zahra” as american historian. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1976, 2014, 2017, 2009—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1976-08-05. The account is most persuasive where Tara, Zahra and American can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american historian. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9355579. VIAF identifies the subject as 17008672. The Library of Congress control number is no2007091356. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 2014, 2017 and 2009.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Tara Zahra”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Tara Zahra primary sources, Tara Zahra archive and Tara research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Tara Zahra”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Tara Zahra” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.