Thomas Whigham

Thomas Whigham is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Born in San Diego, he spent part of his youth in Baja California, where he first learned to fish for grunion, and in Central America, where he vaccinated thousands of Guatemalan and Honduran children against measles, diphtheria, and polio. Whigham received his doctorate in History from Stanford University in 1985. His dissertation, which analyzed trade in Paraguay, Argentina, and the adjacent Brazilian borderlands between 1780 and 1870, was later published in amplified form by the University of New Mexico Press. Whigham continued his research on the contours of 19th-century Latin American history, serving as a Fulbright scholar in South America in 1988 and 1992. He has published widely, and is particularly well-known for his scholarship on the Triple Alliance War (1864-1870), having written five books on the subject, one of which was a CHOICE Academic Title for 2003. He continues to work as an editor with the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the Library of Congress’ reference guide to matters Latin American; as a book reviewer for Ethnohistory and Spain’s Anuario de Estudios Americanos; and a project reviewer for the Social Science Research Council. Whigham is co-director of the Jornadas Internacionales de la Historia del Paraguay, which meets every two years at the University of Montevideo. He is also a corresponding member of the Paraguayan National Academy of History. In recent years he has branched out, publishing a comic novel about academic life in Georgia, The Annotated Zanduski (Lulupress, 2014), as well as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. A New Rendition for the Modern Age (Lulupress, 2019).