1. Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III was an American historian and political scientist at Cornell University who wrote The American Presidency, among 20 other books, and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for his book Seedtime of the Republic.
Clinton Rossiter's parents were Winton Goodrich Rossiter, a stockbroker, and Dorothy Shaw.
Clinton Rossiter was raised to give priority to family and social expectations.
Clinton Rossiter attended Westminster preparatory school in Simsbury, Connecticut, and then attended Cornell University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1939 and was a member of the Quill and Dagger society.
Clinton Rossiter taught briefly at the University of Michigan in 1946, moving to Cornell University in 1947, where he rose from instructor to full professor in eight years.
Clinton Rossiter served as the chair of the Government Department from 1956 to 1959, when he was named John L Senior Professor of American Institutions.
Clinton Rossiter died in his home in Ithaca, New York, on July 11,1970, at age 52.
The New York Times reported that his son Caleb Clinton Rossiter discovered his father's body in the home's basement.
Clinton Rossiter's beloved Cornell University was convulsed with racial conflict, including the occupation of the student union building in April 1969.
However, in the 1990s and the early 21st century, political scientists have rediscovered the substantive and methodological concerns that Clinton Rossiter brought to his work and have found a renewed appreciation for his scholarly works.
In that germinal study, Clinton Rossiter argued that constitutional democracies had to learn the lesson of the Roman Republic to adopt and use emergency procedures that would empower governments to deal with crises beyond the ordinary capacities of democratic constitutional governance but to ensure that such crisis procedures were themselves subject to constitutional controls and codified temporal limits.