John Shelton Curtiss (July 15, 1899 – December 27, 1983), was an American historianofRussia and historical scholar of old Yankee stock. Curtiss was a longtime professor of history at Duke University.
John Shelton Curtiss was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of prominent attorney, Harlow Clarke Curtiss and his socialite wife, Ethel (Mann) Curtiss. His maternal grandfather was Dr. Matthew D. Mann.
In 1925 he decided to do graduate work in history at Columbia University. His first published work appears to have been his 1933 article Sloops of the Hudson, 1800–1850.[1] He taught at Brooklyn College from 1933 to 1936 as well as at Columbia from 1934 to 1936. After teaching himself Russian as a graduate student, he made his first of many trips to the Soviet Union in 1934. He completed his Ph.D. in Russian history at Columbia in 1939.
After receiving his Ph.D. in 1939, Curtiss was hired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be an archivist at his libraryatHyde Park. Among Curtiss' responsibilities there was to oversee FDRs ship model collection.
After World War II began, Curtiss was called to Washington, D.C. along with other Slavic experts to do classified work in the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After finishing his wartime work in 1945, he joined the history department at Duke University where he remained for the rest of his career. From 1946 to 1948, he was also a fellow of the Russian Institute at Columbia. In 1954 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Russian history.[2] In 1966 he was designated James B. Duke Professor of history.[3][4]
During World War II, in 1941 and 1942, while Jews were being, or about to be, exterminated by the Nazis in Europe, Curtiss published his 118-page monograph denying the truth and authenticity of the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, years before Norman Cohn published his work on the subject, Warrant for Genocide (1967). Curtiss's work was endorsed by thirteen American historians, as attested to in the work's Foreword. The book concluded that the Protocols of Zion are, "beyond doubt," a "rank and pernicious forgery."
John Shelton Curtiss married Edna Sutter on September 21, 1925, in Buffalo, New York. She died May 22, 1981, in Durham, North Carolina. They had two children, Anne Curtiss Fong and John Sutter Curtiss (1928–2015).[5] After his wife's death, he moved to Honolulu, Hawaii to live with his daughter and her family. He died December 27, 1983, in Honolulu.
