William Bruce Wheeler

Professor Emeritus

Biography

Professor Wheeler came to the University of Tennessee in 1970, having held professional positions at three other schools. In 1980 and 1986, he was chosen by the University’s National Alumni Association as an outstanding teacher, and he has twice been awarded the L.R. Hesler Award for service to students. From 1987 to 1994, he was the director of the University Honors Program. In 2002, he received the National Alumni Association Award for Public Service.

Professor Wheeler’s principal responsibilities in the department’s graduate program are graduate courses, seminars, theses, and doctoral dissertations in United States Early National History. The most recent dissertation completed under his direction is Anthony Wise’s “‘A Sufficient Competence to Make Them Independent’: Attitudes Toward Authority, Improvement, and Independence in the Carolina-Virginia Backcountry, 1760-1800” (1998). The most recent MA thesis is Robert Glenn Parkinson, “A Founder Held ‘Hostage’: The Image of Thomas Jefferson in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.” Mr. Parkinson is now pursuing his Ph.D. degree at the University of Virginia.

Education

Ph.D. University of Virginia, 1967

Selected Publications

• [with Merry Wiesner, Franklin Doeringer, and Kenneth Curtis] Discovering the Global Past, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
• [with Susan Becker], Discovering the American Past, 2 vols., 5th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
• [with Michael McDonald], TVA and the Tellico Dam: A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-Industrial America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986).
• [with Michael McDonald], Knoxville, Tennessee: Continuity and Change in an Appalachian City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982).