Robert O. Paxton is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences at Columbia University and a former chairman of Columbia’s History Department. He is the leading authority on Vichy France, and his work has so changed the way the French view their history that they speak of “before Paxton” and “after Paxton.” A birder for more than seventy years, he has been president of the Linnaean Society and a member of the New York State Avian Records Committee. He is a bird bander and the editor for North American Birds of birding reports from the Hudson-Delaware region (New York, New Jersey, and Delaware). His reviews of birding books in publications such as Birding and the New York Review of Books often show his special interest in the history of birding.
