Greene, John C

Born 5 March, 1917 in Indianapolis, Indiana. John C. Greene taught at the Universities of Chicago, Iowa State, Berkeley, and Kansas before coming to University of Connecticut in 1967. Her taught at UConn until his retirement twenty years later. He moved to California in 1999.

Born on 5 March 1917 in Indianapolis, Indiana, John Colton Greene grew up in Vermillion, South Dakota where he graduated from the local public school system in 1934. A year after completing a B. A. at the University of South Dakota in 1938, he took an M.A. in American History from Harvard University and then began work on his doctorate. Greene served in the U. S. Army during World War II. His wartime career lasted almost three years (September 1942-April 1946) and took him around the world via San Francisco, Tasmania, India, Iran, Palestine, and Italy . While stationed in Iran, Greene met Ellen Wiemann, a Red Cross nurse from Larchmont, New York . The two were married in Cairo in November 1945 and ultimately had three children, Ruth, Ned, and John.

After the war, Greene returned to Harvard to complete his Ph.D., which he finished in 1952. In 1948, he began teaching, first at the University of Chicago (1948-1952), and then at the University of Wisconsin (1952-1956), Iowa State University (1956-1962), the University of California at Berkeley (1962-1963), and at the University of Kansas (1963-1967). He came to the University of Connecticut in 1967 and remained there until his retirement twenty years later. After his wife's 1998 death from cancer, Greene moved from Storrs in 1999 to California where he currently resides.

Greene's research and writing focused on early American science, the rise and development of evolutionary ideas in Western thought, and the historical relations of science, religion, and world view. He published numerous essays, journal articles and reviews in addition to such monographs as The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (1959), Science, Ideology and World View: Essays in the History of evolutionary Ideas (1981), and American Science in the Age of Jefferson (1984). Greene was honored as a Fellow of the Society of Fellows, H arvard University (1941-1942); a Guggenheim Fellow (1966-1967); a Visiting Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University (1974); and Visiting Historian, National Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution (1978). He was President of the History of Science Society from 1975 to 1977 and in 1985 received an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of South Dakota .