Robert D. Johnston
Director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Teaching of History Program

Robert D. Johnston is Director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Teaching of History program. He has also served as associate professor of history at UIC since January 2003.

The child, nephew, and spouse of educators, Robert has long been immersed in matters relating to teaching. He attended elementary school in Fairview, Oregon and high school in Riverside, California. He received his BA in History from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and was granted the PhD in History from Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, in 1993.

From 1991 to 1994, Robert taught as the sole United States historian at Buena Vista College in Storm Lake, Iowa. He then moved to Yale University, where he served as assistant and associate professor from 1994 to 2002. From 1997 to 2000, he was the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Yale's history department. While at Yale, Robert taught in the Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute and was on the executive committee of Yale College's Teacher Preparation Program. Also, during the 2001-2002 academic year, he was a visiting professor in the Department of American Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Robert's scholarly specialty is twentieth-century political history, with special attention to issues relating to class and medicine. He is currently on leave at UIC's Institute for the Humanities to work on Crusaders Against Vaccination: An American History of Medical Populism, to be published by Oxford University Press. Princeton University Press published his book The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon in 2003. The Radical Middle Class won the 2002 President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association. Robert has also co-edited, with UIC's Burton J. Bledstein, The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (Routledge, 2001) and, with Catherine McNicol Stock, The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Cornell University Press, 2001). His edited collection, The Politics of Healing: Essays in the History of Twentieth-Century North American Alternative Medicine was published in 2004 by Routledge. Robert's upper-elementary/middle school U.S. history textbook, The Making of America: The History of the United States from 1492 to the Present (National Geographic Society), was named one of the School Library Journal's Best Children's Books of 2002. Robert is also the primary American history consultant for National Geographic children's books as well as the general editor for a series of middle school books on new immigrants, to be published in 2007 by Chelsea House.

Through 2008, Robert will be the academic director for a three-year, nearly $1 million dollar Teaching American History grant, the Homewood Flossmoor American History Consortium.Robert has also taught Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teachers in the Newberry Library's Chicago History Project and has been involved in a UIC College of Education Teaching Quality Enhancement grant at South Side CPS high schools. He also served as co-principal investigator on a UIC College of Education National Endowment for the Humanities grant on "Bringing Historical Census Data Alive," and he serves as a consultant on historical art education for the Terra Foundation for the Arts. Robert has been a guest several times on the Chicago Public Radio program "Odyssey" and has reviewed books for the Chicago Tribune. He has also taught or given lectures in Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, England, Norway, Turkey, and Israel.