Morton Hall | 910.962.3318 | toplinrb@uncw.edu
Robert Brent Toplin is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
With regard to scholarship, Toplin served as the editor of film reviews for The Journal of American History from 1986 until 2007, and he now serves as film and media editor for Perspectives in History, the monthly publication of the American Historical Association. Toplin has published a dozen books. He has also published articles in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, The Journal of Southern History, The Hispanic American Historical Review, and other journals and newspapers.
Robert Brent Toplin’s recent books include Radical Conservatism: The Right’s Political Religion and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9//11: How One Film Divided a Nation. Both were released by the University Press of Kansas in 2006. Some of his earlier books include History By Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (University of Illinois Press, 1996) and an edited work, Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond (Oxford University Press, 1996), which was a History Book Club Main Selection. In 2000 he published Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy (University Press of Kansas, 2000) That book includes Toplin’s introductory essay, lengthy original commentaries by filmmaker Oliver Stone based on Toplin’s twenty-one hours of interviews with him, and original essays about Stone’s work by Stephen Ambrose, David Halberstam, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., former presidential candidate George McGovern, and other contributors.
Robert Brent Toplin has been a principal creator of historical dramas that appeared nationally on PBS Television and The Disney Channel, including Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion (which received the George Washington Award from the Freedom’s Foundation for the best historical film of 1982), Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (which received the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best historical film of 1984), and Charlotte Forten’s Mission (1985).
Toplin has appeared more than 25 times as a commentator on nationally broadcast television programs. He has spoken on CBS Television, PBS Television, C-SPAN, The History Channel, and the Turner Classics Movie Channel. His comments on film have also appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and they have been reported in USA Today, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Additionally, Toplin has discussed international issues on nationally broadcast radio shows that had been produced in cooperation with the Organization of American Historians, “Talking History.” He has written numerous op-ed articles on domestic politics and international affairs for the History News Network and has published many op-ed articles that the History News Service distributed to newspapers throughout the United States.
Robert Brent Toplin received his undergraduate training in Psychology at Penn State University and received a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University in 1968. Before teaching at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, he was Associate Professor of History (with tenure) at Denison University in Ohio.
Toplin has received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Annenberg/CPB Project, the Ford Foundation, and other institutions. He also served as the Organization of American Historians Lecturer in Japan in 1999 and as a sponsored speaker in a United Nations conference on international violence that took place in Lima, Peru in 1991. In 2002 he was a keynote speaker in South Africa, and he has served as a speaker in several conferences on film and history that have been held in various cities in the United States and in Europe. In November of 2005 he spoke at The Miller Center for Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia on the subject of “Reagan and the Movies.” Toplin lectured at universities in Israel in 2007, and he has spoken on historical films at the Shorenstein Center at Stanford University in 2008. Toplin has also given presentations at several colleges around the U.S. for the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecturer Program.
Robert Brent Toplin can be reached at Toplinrb@uncw.edu.
