Robert O. Paxton. American political scientist and historian. After attending high school in New England, he earned a BA from Washington and Lee University in 1954. Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent two years studying for a master's degree at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied with historians such as James Joll and John Roberts. He earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1963. Paxton was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining Columbia University in 1969. He worked there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997, although he remains a professor emeritus. Between 1978 and 2017, he has published more than twenty reviews in The New York Review of Books. As a researcher, he has specialized in the social and political history of modern Europe, particularly Vichy France, during World War II. Paxton has worked around two main themes within the general area of ​​modern European history: France during the Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944; and the rise and spread of fascism. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was the first to establish, on the basis of German archives, the active collaboration of Vichy France within Hitler's Europe, a finding initially coldly received in France and now widely accepted.