Access is granted in accordance with the
Protocols for the University Archives and Records Center.
PROVENANCE
The collection was transferred to the University Archives with the records
of the History Department in 1995.
BIOGRAPHICAL
NOTE
Alfred Joseph Rieber was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in
1931. After receiving his B.A. from Colgate University in 1953, he attended the
Russian (now Harriman) Institute of Columbia University and graduated with his
M.A. in 1954 and Ph.D. in 1959. His doctoral program included one year (1958-1959)
at Moscow State University, where he studied as a Columbia Traveling Fellow in
the first U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchange Program. He taught at Northwestern University
from 1959 to 1965, first as Assistant Professor and later as Associate Professor.
In 1965, he was appointed Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
His administrative appointments at Penn include Chairmanship of the History Department
from 1967 to 1972 and Associate Deanship of the School of Arts and Sciences from
1974 to 1976. In 1997, Rieber became a professor emeritus.
As a noted scholar
of Russian history, Rieber won numerous fellowships and awards, among them the
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965, American Council of Learned Societies Exchange
Fellowship with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1966, National Endowment for
the Humanities Senior Fellowship in 1973, the Ford Foundation Grant for Faculty
Enrichment in 1984, and National Council for Soviet and East European Studies
Fellowship in 1986. In addition, he received the Lindbach Teaching Award at Penn
in 1967 and the E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1969. His
major publications are Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941-1947
(1962), The Politics of Autocracy (1966), Merchants and Entrepreneurs
in Imperial Russia (1982) and Zhdanov in Finland (1995).
SCOPE AND CONTENT
The papers of Alfred
J. Rieber include his files as Chairman of the History Department at Penn, 1967-1972;
correspondence, 1960-1995; references and recommendations, 1960-1994; research
of students and scholars, 1973-1992; syllabi, 1959-1994; and teaching files, 1972-1994.
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