Charles C. Alexander papers

Charles Comer Alexander was born on October 24, 1935 in Cass County, Texas. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the Lamar State College of Technology (now called Lamar University), then continued his education at the University of Texas, where he earned his Master's degree in 1959 and a Ph. D. in 1962. In 1960 he married JoAnn Erwin, and their daughter Rachel was born in 1963.

Alexander began his teaching career as an instructor and assistant professor of history at the University of Houston in 1962. In 1966 he took a position as associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and remained there until 1970, also serving as a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Texas during the 1968-1969 school year. He became a full professor of history at Ohio University in 1970, and was named Distinguished Professor of History in 1989. In 1995 he began teaching classes on American baseball before and since 1930. He partially retired from Ohio University in 1999, remaining to teach one quarter per academic year. In 2001 the University of Missouri at Rolla named Alexander a Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professor of Humanities, and he began teaching American Baseball History there in January of 2002.

In addition to his work in the classroom, Alexander has become well-known as a prolific, eloquent, and award-winning writer. His first book, Crusade for Conformity: The Ku Klux Klan in Texas, 1920-1929 (1962) won the L.R. Bryan, Jr. award from the Texas Gulf Coast Historical Association. In 1965 he expanded upon this topic with The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest. Changing his focus, Alexander published three books on the culture and politics of the United States in the 20th century: Nationalism in American Thought, 1930-1945 (1969), Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952-1961 (1975), and Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century America (1980). In the 1980s, "fed up with intellectuals and their discontents," Alexander began to incorporate his love for baseball into his writing career and crafted biographies of three great American ball players: Ty Cobb (1984), John McGraw (1988), and Rogers Hornsby: A Biography (1995). During this time he also published Our Game: An American Baseball History (1991). More recently he has written Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era (2002) and Spoke: A Biography of Tris Speaker (2007).

A professional historian, Alexander has been extremely active in the academic history community, both in the United States and abroad. He has served on the Ohio Historic Site Preservation Advisory Board (1979-1983), the Editorial Board of the Journal of American History (1980-1984), the Executive Council of the Ohio Academy of History (1990-1993), and the Ohio Historical Society Board of Trustees (1990- ?). Alexander has lectured at the universities of Mainz, Bremen, Hamburg and Leipzig in Germany, and gave presentations at international historical conferences in Warsaw, Poland (1977); Ankara, Izmir and Istanbul, Turkey (1985); Moscow, Russia (1986 and 1988); Cambridge, United Kingdom (1991); Yalta, Ukraine (1992); and Middleburg, the Netherlands (1995). He also delivered the keynote speech at the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture in June of 2002.