David Bushnell (historian)

Early life and career

Bushnell was born on May 14, 1923, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University. After graduation, Bushnell worked for both the Latin American Division of the Office of Strategic Services and the United States State Department from 1944 to 1946.

From 1956 to 1963, Bushnell worked as a United States Air Force historian based in Washington, D.C., and New Mexico. He co-authored Space Biology for the U.S. Air Force, which chronicled high-altitude experiments which experts designed to launch people into outer space during the early years of the space program. He also oversaw the creation of an official written history of NASA and served on the NASA Historical Advisory Committee during this period.

Bushnell first visited Colombia as a doctoral student in 1948. He completed his doctorate at Harvard University in 1951 by writing his thesis on the government of Francisco de Paula Santander. Bushnell would ultimately become one of the world's foremost experts on the history of modern Colombia during his career.

Bushnell worked as a professor and academic at the University of Delaware and the University of Florida. He taught at the University of Florida from 1963, when he left the U.S. Air Force, until his retirement in 1991. He remained a professor emeritus at the University of Florida and co-founded the Friends of the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies in March 2005. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1986 to 1991. In 1975 he served as chair of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association.

Besides works on Colombian history, he co-authored with Neill W. Macaulay, Jr. The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (1988, 2nd: 1994, ISBN 0195084020).