William Sheridan Allen
William Sheridan Allen ( born October 5, 1932 in Evanston, Illinois, † March 14, 2013 in Buffalo, New York) was an American historian and university professor.
Biography
William Sheridan Allen studied at the University of Michigan, the University of Connecticut and the University of Minnesota as well as in Germany at the Free University of Berlin and the Georg- August University in Göttingen. From 1970 to 2001 he taught as a professor of German history at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
In addition to his academic work, Allen was politically active throughout his life - he took part in other on campaigns for nuclear disarmament and against the Vietnam War. In 1972, he supported the candidacy of George McGovern for the office of President of the United States.
Works
We did not want (The Nazi Seizure of Power. The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930-1935 ) is the first published work of Allen. It was published in 1965-2006 in 10 editions, besides, it has been translated into four languages. Content The book deals with the example of the Lower Saxony Northeim the political career of a small German town during the last years of the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Third Reich. It tries to answer the question to find out how a civilized democracy could be driven into a totalitarian ideology. A second expanded edition appeared in 1984 in the English language, but was not translated into German.
In addition, Allen The Infancy of Nazism, in which he describes the effect of the propaganda of the Nazis wrote.