Bruce M. Stave Papers

Bruce M. Stave is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus and Director of the Oral History Office at the University of Connecticut. He served as Chair of the Department of History between 1985 and 1994. In 2003, he held the Harry Jack Gray/NEH Distinguished Visiting Humanist appointment at the University of Hartford.

He is a past Editor of the Oral History Review and currently serves on its Editorial Board. He is co-General Editor of the Palgrave/Macmillan Studies in Oral History series. His co-authored From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America was published in the Twayne (Macmillan) Oral History series in 1994 and received the 1995 Homer Babbidge Award from the Association for the Study of Connecticut History and an Award of Merit from the Connecticut League of Historical Societies. The University Press of New England published a paperback edition in 1999. Witnesses to Nuremberg: An Oral History of American Participants at the War Crimes Trials appeared in the same Twayne series in 1998. In 2006, he published Red Brick in the Land of Steady Habits: Creating the University of Connecticut, 1881-2006, a comprehensive institutional history, which won the 2007 Babbidge Award. His article, "Oral History: What It Is & How to Do It," appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of the Hog River Journal.

He is the author or editor of eight other books including five in the field of urban history: The New Deal and the Last Hurrah; Urban Bosses, Machines, and Progressive Reformers; Socialism and the Cities; The Making of Urban History: Historiography Through Oral History; and Modern Industrial Cities: History, Policy, and Survival.

Stave was Associate Editor of the Journal of Urban History between 1976 through 2009; it published more than 25 of his oral history conversations with leading urban historians and practitioners. These dealt with the development of the field in theUnited States, Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Sweden, and the People's Republic of China. Some interviews focused on the bringing of urban history to the public in museums and historical societies. Stave also has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Urban History Association.

He has been a Fulbright Professor at Peking University in Beijing, People's Republic of China (1984-1985), where he taught American urban history, and where he returned to discuss oral history in December, 1998 and May, 2007. His article on oral history in China has been translated into Chinese and published in that nation. He also held Fulbright awards in New Zealand, Australia, and the Philippines (1977), and in India (1968-1969), as well as lecturing and presenting seminars abroad in Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Cypress, Costa Rica, Greece, Iceland, India (2006), Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Uruguay.

Stave was Acting Connecticut State Historian in 2008. As a consequence, he served on the state's Historic Preservation Council and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. In 2008, he was appointed by the Governor to the Connecticut Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He is on the Board of the Association for the Study of Connecticut History. He is past President of the New England Historical Association and also of the New England Association of Oral History. He has served as a member of the Connecticut Humanities Council and the New England Foundation of the Humanities. Stave was a Vice President of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was founding President of the Connecticut Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and was a Mellon Pre-doctoral Fellow.