Early Life and Career
Loewen was born to Winifred and Dr. David F. Loewen in 1942. His mother was a librarian and teacher, and his father was a medical director. Loewen grew up in Decatur, Illinois. He was a National Merit Scholar as a graduate in 1960 from MacArthur High School.
He attended Carleton College. In 1963, as a junior, he spent a semester in Mississippi, an experience in a different culture that led to his questioning what he had been taught about United States history. He was intrigued by learning about the unique place of nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Mississippi culture, commonly thought of as biracial. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University based on his research on the Chinese in Mississippi.
Loewen first taught in Mississippi at Tougaloo College, a historically black college founded by the American Missionary Association after the American Civil War. For 20 years, Loewen taught about racism at the University of Vermont. Since 1997, he has been a Visiting Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
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