“He mapped it all out for me, explaining how you would pursue a career as a historian, what graduate school would be like, what the career would be like. At Columbia, where Wilder earned his PhD., Professor Mark Nathan encouraged him further. But his fate was sealed, or at least shaped by, urban history, in the form of two influential professors with urban roots.Īt Fordham University, Professor Ray Cunningham, an Irish Catholic, brought up in Brooklyn, offered his own beginnings as an example.
He compromised, becoming a history major, and telling himself he’d go to law school. It seemed an exclusive life, far from my model of success.” “When my history professors tried to convince me to become a historian, it made me laugh at first. “To become a historian and scholar, I had to be able to explain the career to my Mom,” he recalls.īecoming an historian was “way out of my neighborhood,” Wilder says. Wilder was drawn to history as a way of understanding the world, but the idea of "thinking for a living" seemed uncertain to him, and more so to his Mother. Raised in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Wilder and his sister were the first in their family to attend college.
Craig Wilder is a thriving historian-a specialist in urban history, author of noted books, recipient of the University Medal of Excellence from Columbia, and advisor to PBS documentaries.
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