John Yoder Papers, 1919-1999

"John Yoder grew up on an Iowa farm and rode his pony to the one-room country school he attended. Since then he has studied, conducted research, and taught in Europe and Africa. At Whitworth, Dr. Yoder teaches African history and politics, third world studies, peace studies, and political philosophy. John Yoder also has taught African history and politics at the University of Liberia and Cuttington University in Liberia (1987-88) and at Daystar University in Kenya (1998). He spent the summer of 2001 in Kenya teaching conflict resolution and organizing a peacebuilding conference in a rural Rift Valley region that had experienced significant ethnic violence.

Among the awards he has received over the years are grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Institute of Peace, and the Pew Foundation. Professor Yoder has published articles on Dahomey, Uganda, Congo, and colonial America. He has also written a series of entries on pacifism, patron-client systems, and totalitarianism for the reference work, Political Theories for Students and articles on Liberian and Congolese history for the Encyclopedia of African History. His book reviews, dealing with works about the Pygmies, forced labor in West Africa, the civil war in Liberia, mythology in Buganda, Christianity and democratization in Africa, pre-colonial history in the Congo, the slave trade, and violence in South Africa, have appeared in The Historian, The American Historical Review, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and Christian Scholar's Review.

John Yoder edited the Zaire volume of the Dictionary of African Biography (1979). In 1992, Cambridge University Press published The Kanyok of Zaire, a book on pre-colonial African social and intellectual history. He recently wrote Popular Political Culture, Civil Society, and State Crisis in Liberia (Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). Currently, he is working with Liberian scholars and politicians committed to government reform in Liberia. John Yoder is also in the midst of an analysis comparing the Book of Judges to pre-industrial Africa. Besides teaching and writing, Dr. Yoder's favorite activities are conducting research in Africa, leading study tours to Africa, analyzing oral histories and myths, and doing carpentry. In the summer of 2000, he built an entire house (actually a playhouse) for his granddaughter Nyomi." (NOTE: John Yoder n.d., http://www.whitworth.edu/Academic/Department/PoliticsHistory/Faculty/YoderJohn/Index.htm, 11 January 2006.)