David B. Danbom: In Memoriam

David Danbom was an AHS Fellow, former AHS President, and Baker Award winner for lifetime achievement. The following tribute was sent to us by four of his former colleagues.

We are remembering our dear friend and colleague, David B. Danbom, who died in Loveland, Colorado, on June 26, 2026, at the age of 79. He was born on March 29, 1947, in Denver, Colorado. He graduated from high school in 1965, then earned a B.A. in history at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. In 1969, with help from a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he entered the graduate program in history at Stanford University. There, he focused on studying the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His advisor, David Kennedy, encouraged him to probe the growing divide in the early 20th century between cities and rural areas. This became the focus of Dave’s PhD dissertation and his first monograph, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930 (Ames, 1979). The book was nominated for the 1980 Frederick Jackson Turner Award given by the Organization of American Historians and highly praised in the major historical journals. In The American Historical Review Professor Karel D. Bicha of Marquette University stated, "Danbom has written a fine book . . . well researched, cogently argued, and very handsomely produced." Professor Irvin M. May of Texas A&M University reviewed the book in The Journal of American History and concluded: "This impressive monograph makes a major contribution to understanding American agriculture. It is good food for thought. Beautifully researched, written for scholars, The Resisted Revolution should stimulate greater examination of the 1900-1930 era." Dave’s article, drawn from his dissertation, “Rural Education Reform and the Country Life Movement, 1900-1920,” won the Vernon Carstensen Award for the best article published in Agricultural History during 1979.  

 Dave completed his PhD in 1974 and accepted a position in the history department at North Dakota State University, Fargo. He remained there until retiring in 2010 as a full professor. While at NDSU, Dave exemplified the three-fold land-grant mission of teaching, research, and service. Dave taught U.S. history survey classes and upper division classes covering most of the 19th and all of the 20th centuries. In addition, he introduced and taught courses in U.S. Agricultural History, History of Rural America, the U.S. in World War II, U.S. Popular Culture, and History of North Dakota. Dave was consistently one of the best teachers in the NDSU history department. He carefully crafted each lecture, was always well organized and exceptionally clear in explaining how people and forces operated in the past, provided evidence and context, and presented the past in a way that deepened one’s knowledge of it while posing questions about how we think about it in the present. He was also well known for a dry wit that students and fellow historians who heard him at conferences loved. Students praised his teaching for his blend of arresting stories, sharp analysis of the themes of a period, clear presentations, encouragement of their questions, and humor. Dave’s legacy is evident among many high school teachers who took his courses and were deeply influenced by his teaching strategies. One estimate of the sheer number of students whom he taught over a 36-year career is at least 15,000.

 His excellent teaching was recognized in several awards. Among them were the Burlington Northern Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Fargo Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Professor Award, both in 1990. In 1998, Dave was awarded the prestigious Faculty Lectureship Award by NDSU that recognized excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service. In 2002, he received the Outstanding Educator Award from the NDSU College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. And NDSU students in the Mortar Board Honor Society named him their Preferred Professor in 1985, 1990, and 1997.

 Dave had numerous discussions while at Stanford with David Kennedy about the values and ethics of leading figures in the Progressive era. He built on ideas from those conversations along with his own deep knowledge of the period in publishing his second book, “The World of Hope”: Progressives and the Struggle for an Ethical Public Life (Philadelphia, 1987). In his review appearing in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, LeRoy Ashby wrote: “It would be difficult to find a better study of the progressive ‘mind’ or world view than what David Danbom provides in [this] excellent book. “The World of Hope” is strikingly successful in providing a broad overview of the dominant values and assumptions that marked reform thought in the progressive era.”

 After this, Dave returned to agricultural history which was the focus of much of his scholarship throughout his career. In the 1980s, he devoted several years of research to the history of agricultural experiment stations in the United States and in particular to the station based at North Dakota State University. This work led him to publish three articles: “The Agricultural Experiment Station and Professionalization of Scientists’ Goals for Agriculture,” Agricultural History (Spring 1986); “Politics, Science, and the Changing Nature of Research at the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station,” North Dakota History (Summer 1989), which earned him the Editor’s Choice Award from the State Historical Society of North Dakota; and “The North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station and the Struggle to Create a Dairy State,” Agricultural History (Spring 1989). His research on experiment stations culminated with his monograph, “Our Purpose Is to Serve”: The First Century of the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station (Fargo, ND, 1990). Deborah Fitzgerald’s review in The Journal of American History praised Dave for “setting a standard of writing and understanding that future chroniclers will no doubt struggle to match.” She concluded, “Danbom is a master at bringing character and life to these mundane matters and imbues his actors with intelligence and wit.”

 Dave strove for excellence in both his teaching and research. By the 1990s, he thought increasingly about how the two endeavors were tightly woven together. This insight compelled him to write a history of rural America based on his deep reading of the scholarly literature and his own research and lectures. Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, appeared in 1995. Widely adopted in Rural and Agricultural history courses around the country, the book appeared in a second edition in 2006 and a third in 2017. Dorothy Schwieder, in her review in The Historian, asserted that “Born in the Country will soon be viewed as indispensable in any study or treatment of rural life. From this point on, anyone writing in the field will need to start with Danbom’s book. It will help provide the framework, moreover, for the ever-increasing number of monographs on American rural life that are sure to follow.”

 Dave often remarked that historians “should fly the flag of history.” He found many ways to do so, especially with regard to local, state, and regional practitioners of history, history teachers, and historical agencies. He served on the editorial board of North Dakota History, was acquisitions editor of the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, and was instrumental in bringing together colleagues in history at nearby institutions of higher education. Mindful of the three institutions in Fargo and Moorhead, each of which boasted strong history departments, he conceived of the Tri-College History Lecture, an annual event in which historians from Concordia College, Minnesota State University-Moorhead, and NDSU took turns presenting their research. Above all, Dave was an active, enthusiastic, and leading figure in the Northern Great Plains History Conference, an annual conference of historians who specialized in all manner of periods and subjects. Dave frequently delivered papers and commentaries at the conference, served on its board, and chaired the program committee when NDSU hosted the NGPHC about once each decade. His commitment to the conference was capped in 1996 with the Larry Rowen Remele Award, named for a former editor of North Dakota History whom Dave had much admired. 

 The title of Dave’s history of the Experiment Station, “Our Purpose Is To Serve,” could have been his personal motto as well. Listing all of his service to the profession, to NDSU, and to his communities would be daunting. In addition to those noted above, Dave served as the president of the Agricultural History Society in 1990-1991 and was awarded their Gladys Baker award for lifetime achievement in 2014. He also served as an Associate Editor of Agricultural History, as the book review editor for H-New Deal, and as manuscript reviewer for The Journal of American History, the Western Historical Quarterly, Kansas History, Social Science History, The Historian, and Agricultural History.

 At NDSU Dave’s university service was highly valued because of his honesty and integrity, his practical political insights, and his ability to get things done. Dave was a founding member of the Women’s Studies Committee and later served as the Rhodes Scholarship Coordinator. The most important of the numerous university-wide committees on which he served included the Honorary Degree Committee, the Conflict Resolution Board, the Special Investigative Panel of the Academic Integrity Committee, the University Senate Ad Hoc Committee to Revise PTE Policies, the Standing Committee on Faculty Rights, the Faculty Mentoring Program, the Fargo Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Professor Committee, and the 1999 Presidential Search Committee.

 Dave was also committed to serving the communities in which he lived. He was a member of the Heritage Hjemkomst Steering Committee, executive secretary of the Red River Heritage Society, and chair of the Fargo Historic Preservation Commission, from whom he received the Fargo Heritage Society Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Historic Preservation in 1998. After he moved to Loveland, Colorado, he served on its Historic Preservation Commission. Dave was also an outstanding “good citizen,” as a member of the Fargo Human Relations Commission, the Mayor’s Task Force on Downtown Fargo, and as the author of numerous insightful “Other Views” columns in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.

 Dave deeply believed that historians should, whenever possible, connect their scholarship and teaching to the places that they lived, taught, and worked. He found numerous ways to do this in Fargo and North Dakota and the Upper Midwest and Great Plains region. While he was frequently called by local media outlets for his historical perspective on current topics in the news, his analyses were also sought by the Wall Street Journal,The New Yorker, and even the French newspaper La Croix! He portrayed the 19th century bonanza farmer, Oliver Dalrymple, before local groups in North Dakota. He taught summer courses at NDSU for the Elderhostel program and the OLLI program for older adults at Colorado State University. Throughout his career, he spoke to numerous local community organizations such as the Pioneer Daughters of North Dakota, the Fargo Fine Arts Club, and the local Lions chapter.

 Dedicated to promoting a deeper historical understanding of the state and city where he lived, he published several essays including “North Dakota: The Most Midwestern State,” in James Madison’s edited book, Heartland (Bloomington, IN, 1988). His essay was an insightful examination of the values and character of North Dakotans. His contribution to another edited work, Politics in the Postwar American West (Norman, OK, 1995), examined seminal changes to North Dakota’s main political parties in the decades following the war. He published two books on Fargo. The first, co-authored with Claire Strom, was part of Arcadia Publishing Images of America Series: Fargo, North Dakota, 1870-1940 (2002). His book, Going It Alone: Fargo Grapples with the Great Depression (St. Paul, 2005), provided a deeply researched and engagingly written monograph that was a model of local history. On this subject, he won for the second time the Editor’s Choice Award for best article in North Dakota History for "Fargo and the Great Depression," North Dakota History (Summer/Fall 1999). His article, “’He Was a Man, Worthy of Respect’: Gender, Matrimony, and Moral Entitlement in Fargo, North Dakota, During the Great Depression,” North Dakota History (2003) won him that award for a third time. He secured it a fourth time in 2011 when he and Karen Danbom co-authored, “Survival through Adaptation: The Fargo Nursery School, 1933-1965,” North Dakota History (2011).

 Dave was fascinated by how things actually worked in the past, with how and why people acted in ways that they did. He also understood that history was complicated and that many subjects could not be quickly summarized or easily grasped. He always searched for ways to better present complex topics. One year he found such a strategy to explain the nuances of the New Deal-era Agricultural Adjustment Act, and he reported on how effectively it worked to his colleagues. In a U.S. Survey class on the post-Civil War period, he conceived of an imaginary firm that he called the History 104 Mayonnaise Company to teach undergraduates how to understand the difference between horizontal and vertical integration of the economy.

 Dave’s passion for teaching how things worked culminated with his book, Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains (Baltimore, 2014). The following year, he edited a work on rural life in the American West: Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West (Salt Lake City, 2015).

 Despite his own heavy load of teaching, research and writing, and service, Dave was generous with his time. By reading and commenting on manuscripts of his colleagues, he greatly encouraged their scholarship. As a mentor and advisor both to undergraduate and graduate students, he was similarly generous with his counsel about their interests and chosen topics, suggesting where to look for sources, and reading and commenting on their work. Within the history department, when a challenging or difficult chore needed to be done and no one else wanted the job, Dave accepted it and did it well.

 Anyone interested in further exploring Dave’s career may wish to read “An Interview with David Danbom, Historian of Rural America,” Great Plains Quarterly (Spring 2014) with Jon K. Lauck as interviewer. Lauck’s edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Midwestern History (New York, 2025), contains Dave’s last scholarly publication, “The Midwest As a Rural Region, in Reality and in the American Mind.”

 In closing we wish to take note, on this 250th anniversary of American Independence, of Dave’s great enthusiasm for the July 4th holiday. Dave participated fervently in July 4th celebrations in admiration of what Americans had achieved in 1776: the right of people to govern themselves and recognition that “all men are created equal.” He defended those principles throughout his career and worked tenaciously to ensure that Americans fulfilled the promises laid down in the Declaration of Independence, something which required constant effort from engaged citizens. Dave modeled such civic engagement in recent years especially, a moment of great peril for American democracy. We imagine that such thoughts animated Dave on the 4th of July when he led his South 8th Street Fargo neighborhood in a vibrant parade of adults, children, and dogs, bicycles decorated in red, white, and blue, noisemakers sounding and American flags flying, and shouts of Happy Birthday U.S.A. Adorned in a tall hat and white beard, Dave as Uncle Sam led the parade beneath a leafy canopy of tall trees in celebration of the country’s founding. It was his favorite way of sharing history. 

 Dave is survived by Karen, his wife of 55 years, a daughter, Elizabeth Cushmore, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a son, Mark, of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, four grandchildren, a brother, Daniel, of Denver, and countless colleagues,  students, and friends whose lives were enriched by interactions with him. 

Mark Harvey, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies, North Dakota State University
Larry Peterson, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies, North Dakota State University
Carroll Engelhardt, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Concordia College
Barbara Handy-Marchello, Associate Professor Emerita, Department of History, University of North Dakota

July 4, 2026