Professor Emeritus
Phone: 845-471-4305
Clyde Griffen, formerly Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor, taught American history at Vassar from 1957 to 1992. He earned his B.A. with Honors in History from the University of Iowa and his M.A. and Ph.D., under Richard Hofstadter, from Columbia University. He taught for three years in Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program.
Coming to Vassar, he taught courses related to his graduate specialties in political and intellectual history, and Carl Degler's course in cultural history. In the mid-1960s Professor Griffen served as Dean of Freshmen, member of the Vassar-Yale Study staff and coauthor of the Report on the Education of Men at Vassar.
With a Ford Foundation grant for joint student-faculty research, he and his wife Sally investigated occupational mobility in the labor force, male and female, of Poughkeepsie, 1850-1880, with additional grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation. Harvard University Press published their Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Poughkeepsie (1978) in its Urban History Series.
The book led the University of Auckland to invite the Griffens to New Zealand on a Fulbright to examine local archives and suggest projects in Auckland's social history. Subsequently the Caversham Project at the University of Otago asked Professor Griffen to visit in 1996 and in 1998 to collaborate on a study of social structure and opportunity in Dunedin's southern suburbs in the early 20th century.
At Vassar, Professor Griffen's teaching interests shifted in the 1960s and 70s to social and urban history, with courses titled "City, Town, and Countryside," "The Making of an Industrial Society, 1877-1920," and a departmental introductory course titled "The American Experience in the Twentieth Century." He also began to participate in the early 1970s in the new multidisciplinary American Culture Program. Winning a year's fellowship to a National Humanities Institute in New Haven, he developed the first version of a new syllabus focused on Individualism in America for the introductory seminar in that program.
Becoming interested through women's history in gender, Professor Griffen co-edited Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (University of Chicago Press, 1990). In retirement, still living on campus, he co-authored Full Steam Ahead in Poughkeepsie: The Story of Coeducation at Vassar, 1966-1974 (Vassar College, 2000). Currently he is collaborating with geographer Harvey Flad on a book to be titled Main Street Re-Visited: Two Centuries of Landscape and Social Change in the Poughkeepsie Urban Region.