About Frank Freidel

Freidel was born in Brooklyn, New York of Quaker parents, Edith (Heacock) and Frank Burt Freidel.[3] He was raised in Plattsburgh, New York and parts of Southern California as his father struggled to support the family during the Great Depression. He received his B.A. (1937) and M.A. (1939) from the University of Southern California, then pursued his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the direction of William B. Hesseltine, graduating in 1942. His doctoral thesis was on 19th-century jurist Francis Lieber. His contemporaries at Wisconsin included Richard N. Current and T. Harry Williams, who later collectively authored with Freidel a U.S. history textbook, A History of the United States, dedicated to Hesseltine.[4] His first academic appointment was in 1941 to Shurtleff College.