James Loewen. Decatur (USA), 1942. American sociologist, historian and author. He studied at Carleton College. In 1963, in his third year, he spent a semester in Mississippi, an experience in a different culture that led him to question what he had been taught about American history. He was intrigued to learn about the unique place where 19th century Chinese immigrants settled and their descendants in the Mississippi culture, considered biracial. He later earned a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University that grew out of his research on Chinese-Americans in Mississippi. He first taught in Mississippi at Tougaloo College, a historically black college founded by the American Missionary Association after the American Civil War. For twenty years, he has taught on racism at the University of Vermont, where he is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology. Since 1997, he has been a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. In 2012, the American Sociological Association awarded him the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award for "services to social justice." He is the first white person to have won this award. In that same year, the National Council for Social Studies awarded Loewen its Spirit of America award, previously received by great personalities such as Jimmy Carter, Rosa Parks, and Fred Rogers, among others.