Chambers, Clarke A.

Clarke A. Chambers was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota on June 3, 1921, the son of physician Winslow Clarke Chambers and Anna Anderson Chambers. He received his B.A. from Carleton College in January 1943 and enlisted that same month in the U.S. Army Air Forces, 29th Bomber Command. He was trained as a weather observer and was stationed in the Western Pacific in the spring of 1944, having married his college sweetheart Florence earlier that year.

Over the next sixteen months he was successively stationed in Hawaii, Saipan, the Marianas, Guam, Okinawa, and Japan, as the war was fought to a conclusion. Chambers was a sergeant in the First Weather Squadron and was primarily assigned as a weather observer and cryptographer in all of those Western Pacific locations.

Following the war, Chambers received his M.A. (1947) and Ph.D. (1950) from the University of California-Berkeley, where he taught American history 1950-1951, and served again as guest professor in 1961-1962. He was appointed professor of American History at the University of Minnesota in 1951, where he remained the rest of his career, serving as department chair, 1971-1976, and retiring from his reular appointment in 1990. He currently holds the title of Professor Emeritus. Chambers is a leading scholar in the field of American social welfare history, and he founded (1963) and directed the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota throughout his active career.