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Theodore Rosengarten

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 revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ7782017 ↗
Source-derived summary

Theodore Rosengarten (born December 17, 1944) is an American historian.

He graduated from Amherst College in 1966 with a BA, and earned his PhD from Harvard University with a dissertation on Ned Cobb (1885–1973), a former Alabama tenant farmer. Subsequently, he developed his interviews with Cobb as a kind of "autobiography", All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974), which won the U.S. National Book Award in category Contemporary Affairs.

About fifteen years later, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw was adapted and produced as a one-man play starring Cleavon Little at the Lamb's Theater in New York City.

Awards

1989 MacArthur Fellows Program

Works

All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, Knopf, 1974, ISBN 978-0-394-49084-7

Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, Authors Theodore Rosengarten, Thomas Benjamin Chaplin, Editor Susan W. Walker, Morrow, 1986, ISBN 978-0-688-05412-0

Land of Deepest Shade: Photographs of the South, authors Theodore Rosengarten, Photographs John McWilliams, High Museum of Art, 1989, ISBN 978-0-89381-392-5

"A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life", Editors Theodore Rosengarten, Dale Rosengarten, University of South Carolina Press, 2002, ISBN 978-1-57003-445-9

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art, Authors Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, Enid Schildkrout, Judith Ann Carney, Museum for African Art, 2008, ISBN 978-0-945802-50-1

References

External links

"The Hem of My Garment: An Interview with Theodore Rosengarten about the Making of "Nate Shaw"", George Abbott White and Theodore Rosengarten, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Theodore Rosengarten” is american historian. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Theodore, Rosengarten and American, not as a finished interpretation.

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—1944, 1966, 1885, 1973—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1944-12-17. For this dossier, Theodore, Rosengarten and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american historian” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

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 Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7782017. VIAF identifies the subject as 71463735. The Library of Congress control number is n83176466. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1966, 1885 and 1973.

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.

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  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Theodore Rosengarten”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Theodore Rosengarten primary sources, Theodore Rosengarten archive and Theodore 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

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  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 “Theodore Rosengarten” 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.