Edwin Charles Rozwenc was born on May 21, 1915 in Dover, New Jersey. He graduated from Amherst College in the Class of 1937 and obtaining his M.A. (1938) and Ph.D. (1941) from Columbia University. After teaching history at Clark University from 1942 to 1946, Rozwenc returned to Amherst as a professor of History. During his professorship, which began in 1946 and continued until his death in 1974, Rozwenc wrote or edited many books on American history and served as chairman of the Department of American Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Cooperatives Come to America (1941), Slavery as a Cause of the Civil War (1949), Reconstruction in the South (1952), The New Deal (1958), The Cause of the American Civil War (1961), Ideology and Power in the Age of Jackson (1964), and The People Make a Nation (1971).