Baxter, Annette Kar

Annette Kar Baxter was born on 12 November 1926 in New York, New York. She attended New York University for one year before transferring to Barnard College. In 1947 she received an A.B. from Barnard, and began working full-time as an editorial assistant at Random House, a position that she began on a part time basis her senior year. In the fall she returned to school, earning an A.M. from Smith College in 1948 and another A.M. from Radcliffe College in 1949. She worked as an assistant curator for the collection of regional history at Cornell University from 1949 to 1951. She enrolled in the Ph.D. program in American Civilization at Brown University, where she was a Carnegie Teaching Fellow for the academic year 1951-52. She then began her life-long career at Barnard, working at first as a lecturer and then as an associate in the history department. She served as the executive secretary for the University Seminar on American Civilization at Columbia from 1953-59, and served as the secretary for the American Studies Bibliography Project of the American Studies Association from 1953-56. In 1955, she married psychiatrist James E. Baxter. Her first child, Justin McDonald, was born in 1959, and her daughter, Adrienne Marshall, was born in 1962.

She received her Ph.D. from Brown in 1958 and was promoted to the status of lecturer in the History Department at Barnard. Two years later she became an associate in History. In 1966 she was appointed as an assistant professor of history and was quickly promoted to associate professor status. She reached full professorship in 1971, and in 1975 had the honor of being one of a handful of women to be awarded an endowed chair, named for Adolph and Effie Ochs.

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