13 Facts About Gilbert Fite

Gilbert C Fite was an American historian best known for his numerous works on American agricultural history.

Gilbert Fite graduated from a Free Methodist secondary school in Wessington Springs, South Dakota, and attended junior college in the area.

Gilbert Fite enrolled in the University of South Dakota at Vermillion, SD, and graduated with his master's degree in 1941.

In 1945, Gilbert Fite began teaching at the University of Oklahoma alongside other prominent historians such as Edward Everett Dale and Carl Rister.

Gilbert Fite spent 26 years at the University of Oklahoma as an instructor and a researcher until he took over the position of college president at Eastern Illinois University.

Gilbert Fite retired from teaching in 1986 but continued to research and write on agricultural history.

In 1939, while in a hospital in Mitchell, SD hospital, Gilbert Fite met Alberta June Goodwin.

Gilbert Fite died on July 13,2010, in Fort Myers, Florida.

In 1990, Gilbert Fite entered the South Dakota Hall of Fame.

In total, Gilbert Fite authored, co-authored, or edited over eighteen monograph-length works and fifty articles.

Gilbert Fite's first work, an expansion of his doctoral thesis, was an investigation into how Peter Norbeck, a South Dakota politician, helped secure federal support for agricultural programs and the Mount Rushmore National Monument.

In 1991, Fite completed a biography of Richard B Russell, a prominent Georgia politician for whom the chair that Fite occupied at the University of Georgia was named.

Gilbert Fite's work was one of the first to bring ideas of historical agency to those who chose to live in the Great Plains while explaining how agriculture became the dominant economic engine of the region due to decisions made by these early American settlers.