Born in Baltimore during World War II, Jack Chatfield was raised in Massachusetts, suburban Washington, and Vermont. After four years at a military boarding school in the Shendandoah Valley of Virginia, he entered Trinity College in the Fall of 1960. Required to withdraw temporarily from the college after his sophomore year, he spent a year working as a field secretary for the Southwest Georgia project of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. After returning to Trinity, he declared as a history major and graduated with his BA in June 1965. He entered Columbia University in the fall of 1965 and began work on his PhD. After three years at Columbia, he departed  graduate school and took a public school teaching job in Eastchester, New York, not far from Manhattan. The next year he accepted a job at Watkinson School in West Hartford, where he was to teach for seven years. In 1977 he became a visiting instructor at Trinity. He was fortunate enough to be asked to teach courses not only in the History Department but in the expanding American Studies program. By 1983, when he left Trinity to devote full time to dissertation research, he was teaching a wide variety of courses on both the graduate and undergraduate levels. He had long thought of himself as a historian of modern America. But because of his teaching duties – which included History 201 (America from the “age of Columbus” through the Civil War) and the Formative Years (The Revolution and Early Republic) – Professor Chatfield executed an intellectual “migration.” His dissertation is a study of Connecticut politics during the Jeffersonian era, and his published scholarship carries the story through the War of 1812. In 1987, he competed successfully for a position in early American history. Still devoted to the study of Cold War America, Professor Chatfield has taught a cycle of courses which extends from the colonial era to Watergate and the fall of South Vietnam. He is also an amateur jazz drummer, and will accept any opportunity to appear with his jazz quintet, “Bebop.edu.” The group will be performing at Homecoming on November 10, 2007.