Early Life
Born in Denver in 1927, the son of the journalist, novelist, and screenwriter Clyde Brion Davis and the artist and writer Martha Wirt Davis, Davis lived a peripatetic childhood in California, Colorado, New York, Colorado, and Washington State. Despite the frequent moves, Davis was popular among his peers. In 1938, when he and his parents moved for a year to Carmel, California, his fellow students elected him president of a large sixth grade class. Three years later, he won election as president of the Hamburg, New York Junior High School, some forty-seven years before he would be elected president of the Organization of American Historians. The experience of settling in, only to move again, served to heighten his awareness of the role of contingency in individual lives and history. He attended five high schools in four years. In 1943, after moving to Manhattan from Beverly Hills, where he had done well, he transferred to The Bronx High School of Science weeks after classes had begun. Unable to catch up, he became so depressed that he considered lying about his age, and joining the Marines. Fortunately, near the end of the term his mother succeeded in enrolling him in the elite McBurney Prep School, where he initially failed some midterm examinations, but in the next three semesters succeeded so well that at graduation he won the gold Robert Ross McBurney medal, the school's highest award. That's why he was able to get into Dartmouth, the only college he applied to, when he was in the army in Germany.
After graduation in June 1945, at the age of 18, he was drafted and trained as a combat infantryman in preparation for a fall 1945 invasion of Japan. With the end of the war, he was assigned to the occupation in Germany in 1945-46. There, he became a member of the army's Security Police, to police civilians, because he passed a test in speaking German, which he had studied in high school.
Following his military service, Davis attended Dartmouth College, where he majored in philosophy with a focus on evolving conceptions of human nature. At Dartmouth, he was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and graduated Summa Cum Laude. In the summer of 1947, he worked as a laundry truck driver and gardener. In 1950-51, before enrolling in the Program in American Civilization at Harvard, Davis worked for most of a year scheduling and supervising the flow of parts to the main assembly line at Cessna Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas. He attended Harvard for three years, 1951–53 and 1954–55, where he completed his dissertation, which was accepted by his advisor Howard Mumford Jones. In 1953-54, he taught full time at Dartmouth as a Ford Foundation Teaching Intern. In 1955, he joined Cornell's History faculty; during his first year of teaching, he had to make revisions in his dissertation to satisfy Frederick Merk of the Harvard History Department.
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