William R. Everdell

Born in New York in 1941, William R. Everdell graduated from St. Paul’s School and from Princeton University. A Woodrow Wilson Scholar and Fulbright Scholar, he holds a certificate pratique from the University of Paris and a master's degree in History from Harvard University. After serving as a Marine in Morocco, he earned his Ph.D in in Modern Intellectual History in 1971 at New York University.

In 1971, he began teaching at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, where he taught world history until retiring in 2016. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and is the author of a number of books and articles on the history of ideas. One book, The End of Kings (1983, 2000) recaptures the historical definition of "republic" as a state not ruled by one person. Another, The First Moderns (1997) redefines "Modernism" as the abandonment of the continuous in favor of the discrete in the arts and sciences that began in the West in 1872–1913. (A new chapter for The First Moderns can be obtained on request to wreverdell@gmail.com.) In 2021 Springer published his The Evangelical Counter-Enlightenment, which uses biographical profiles to argue that Wahhabi Islam, Hasidic Judaism, and "Evangelical" Protestant Christianity, which arose nearly simultaneously in the middle of the 18th century CE, are best understood as aspects of what Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment.

He has also written on the teaching of history, and served on the Test Development Committee for the first Advanced Placement World History Exams. A past President of the the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (http://www.ec-asecs.org/) and member of the American Historical Association, he has also served as the president of the AHA-affiliated Organization of History Teachers.

(Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Everdell, which gives links to evidence of its assertions.)