September 8, 2017(2017-09-08) (aged 97) Bologna,
Italy
Academic career
From the late 1940s to the late 1990s, Dowd taught at
Cornell University, the
University of California, Berkeley and other universities. He has authored books that criticize capitalism in general, and US capitalism in particular.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of economic history for the academic year 1959–1960.[3]
Many of his writings and audio transcripts are available on his website.[4]
Personal life
Dowd was the son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. The strong dislike for each side of the family for the other side led him during his youth to embrace an antireligious attitude.[5]
Dowd claimed to be "non-religious" without saying if he was an
agnostic or
atheist.
Dowd was a sponsor of the War Tax Resistance project, which practiced and advocated
tax resistance as a form of protest against the Vietnam War.[7]
Dowd was the faculty sponsor of the West Tennessee Voters Project in Fayette County, Tennessee, that inspired a sizable number of Cornell students to become more active in civil rights work in the South one year after the gruesome murder of
Andrew Goodman,
Michael Schwerner and
James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Bibliography
Step by step (1965)
Modern Economic Problems in Historical Perspective (1965)
Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal; Lectures and Essays Commemorating the Hundredth Anniversary of Veblen's Birth (1965)
America's role in the world economy:the challenge to orthodoxy (1966)
^Severson, Robert F. (1975). "Review of The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the United States Since 1776. By Douglas F. Dowd". The Journal of Economic History. 35 (2): 477–478.
doi:
10.1017/S0022050700075227.
S2CID154170692.