Robert Owen Paxton was born on June 15,1932 and is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era.
14 Facts About Robert Paxton
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Robert Paxton is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University.
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Robert Paxton is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, which precipitated intense debate in France, and led to a paradigm shift in how the events of the Vichy regime are interpreted.
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Robert Paxton attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for his secondary education.
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Robert Paxton taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1969.
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Robert Paxton served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997.
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Robert Paxton has contributed more than twenty reviews to The New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2017.
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Unlike Aron and Henri Michel, Robert Paxton did not play down Vichy's achievements in his explanation of its domestic agenda.
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Robert Paxton argued that the reforms undertaken by the Vichy government prefigured the reforms of the 1950s and 1960s and derived from Vichy's aim to transform French society.
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In 1997, Robert Paxton was called as an expert witness to testify about collaboration during the Vichy period, at the trial in France of Maurice Papon.
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Robert Paxton noted that the Gaullists would object to Paxton's portrayal of them as "heirs of the regime they fought against" and that it would disturb all those who believed that Petain had played a "double game" between the Axis and the Allies.
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Robert Paxton has focused his work on exploring models and definition of fascism.
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In 2021, Robert Paxton wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in which he stated that he now believed Donald Trump was a fascist, after insisting for several years that he was instead a right-wing populist.
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Robert Paxton is an avid birdwatcher and a former president of the Linnaean Society of New York.