Interview with John R. Wunder

Abstract

Interview with John R. Wunder Jon K. Lauck (bio) In May 2014 the historian John R. Wunder, who spent the largest part of his career at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, took time out from his current projects to discuss his career in general, and more particularly, his interest in regional history, including the history of the Plains and the Midwest. Wunder, born in Iowa, earned his ba and law degrees at the University of Iowa before earning his PhD in history under the guidance of Vernon Carstensen at the University of Washington. John taught at several universities around the United States—in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the southern Great Plains, and the Deep South. Eventually, Wunder became the director of the Center for Great Plains Studies and a professor of history at the University of Nebraska. He also served as associate dean of the University of Nebraska’s College of Arts and Sciences and president of the Western History Association and the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society. He is the author or editor of nineteen books and over fifty academic articles. Wunder retired from the University of Nebraska in August 2011. He still lives in Lincoln, where he continues his research and writing. Where were you born? I was born in a hospital in Vinton, Iowa, a small county seat town in east central Iowa on January 7, 1945, to Mary (Remley) Wunder and Arnold Wunder. My middle name was my mother’s maiden name. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Dysart, Iowa, which is a town of eight hundred about fifteen miles west of Vinton. What did your parents do for a living? My mother graduated from the University of Iowa and was a high school social studies teacher. She taught in several Iowa communities before she married my father, but her career was interrupted by my birth and then shortly thereafter by her contracting the awful disease multiple sclerosis which eventually [End Page 289] paralyzed her. My father graduated from Dysart High School; he worked first as a mechanic in a local gas station and then he had his own business supplying fuel oil and petroleum products to farmers and local businesses and homes. Where did you go to college and what did you study? I went to Iowa as a major in mathematics. We had had a wonderful high school math teacher who was a spinster and tough as nails. She taught us algebra, and trigonometry, geometry, and advanced algebra, but at Iowa I soon learned in my geometry class I just didn’t have a theoretical mathematics brain. At the end of my first semester and the beginning of the second, I first changed my major to accounting. That lasted one week. Instead I became a history major because my Western Civilization classes both semesters convinced me that history was to be my life’s work. I majored in history and political science graduating with a ba in 1967. I was captivated by the history of the American West classes (two courses for an entire academic year) taught by Professor Malcolm Rohrbough. I then took a fellowship to study the American West with Professor Rohrbough’s major professor, who was then at the University of Washington, Professor Vernon Carstensen.1 Rohrbough joked he was sending a son to study with his grandfather. [In 1974, after earning my PhD, I] received a position as a visiting assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. There I taught the American survey, American West, and American legal history. If I recall correctly, you also encountered Christopher Lasch during your time at Iowa.2 Is that correct? Yes, he often would entertain an informal group of students at the student union. I remember once (probably spring of 1968) when tension was very high on campus with Vietnam demonstrations, I sat on the ballroom floor along with a hundred students as Lasch, also sitting on the floor, talked at length about historic American wars and compared them to Vietnam. He was quite inspirational. At some point, his departure that year from Iowa was not a happy one for him or the history department. It has been noted...