Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions

The Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions was established on 5 February 1944 from a sum of £44,000 received from the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press in 1943 and augmented by a further £5,000 in 1946. The title of the chair was changed to the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions in 1951.

The professorship is unusual in that tenure is for a period of one year only.

List of Pitt Professors of American History and Institutions

• 1945 Dexter Perkins
• 1946 No election
• 1947 Henry Steele Commager
• 1948 Roy Franklin Nichols
• 1949 Walt Whitman Rostow
• 1950 John Donald Hicks
• 1951 Ralph Henry Gabriel
• 1952 Avery Odelle Craven
• 1953 Corwin D. Edwards
• 1954 John Bartlet Brebner
• 1955 William Thomas Easterbrook
• 1956 Edward Chase Kirkland
• 1957 Paul Abraham Freund
• 1958 Richard Hofstadter
• 1959 Eugene Victor Rostow
• 1960 Clinton Lawrence Rossiter
• 1961 Richard Palmer Blackmur
• 1962 John Hope Franklin
• 1963 John Morton Blum
• 1964 Daniel Joseph Boorstin
• 1965 Thomas Childs Cochran
• 1966 Peter Michael Blau
• 1967 James Willard Hurst
• 1968 William Clement Eaton
• 1969 Henry David
• 1970 Walter Galenson
• 1971 Henry Farnham May
• 1972 Morris Janowitz
• 1973 Eric Louis McKitrick
• 1974 Archibald Cox
• 1975 Robert William Fogel
• 1976 Eugene Dominick Genovese
• 1977 Paul Allan David
• 1978 Stephan Thernstrom
• 1979 Eliot Freidson
• 1980 Eric Foner
• 1981 Douglass Cecil North
• 1982 Gordon Stewart Wood
• 1983 Judith N. Shklar
• 1984 Robert Huddleston Wiebe
• 1985 Peter Temin
• 1986 Bernard Bailyn
• 1987 Daniel Bell
• 1988 Warren Forbes Kimball
• 1989 Nathan Rosenberg
• 1990 Timothy Hall Breen
• 1991 Vacant
• 1992 Carol Gilligan
• 1993 Michael Fitzgibbon Holt
• 1994 Peter Gavin Wright
• 1995 Dan Thomas Carter
• 1996 John Shelton Reed
• 1997 Sylvia R. Frey
• 1998 Stanley Engerman
• 1999 James Tyler Petterson