Andrew F. Rolle was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1922. He graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1943 and served as a Military Intelligence Officer in Europe. In 1953 he received his doctoral degree in history from UCLA. From 1953 to 1988 he taught at Occidental College, being named Robert Glass Cleland Professor of History in 1965. A specialist in the history of California and the West, Rolle was also one of the first historians to introduce psychohistory into the undergraduate curriculum and into the consciousness of the historical profession in America. He completed his own psychoanalytic training at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in 1976. His many publications include: California: A History, fifth edition forthcoming (New York: Crowell, 1963); “The Historic Past of the Unconscious,” in Lasswell, Lerner, and Speier (eds.), Propaganda and Communication in World History (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980); The Italian-Americans: Troubled Roots (New York: Free Press, 1980); and John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1991). Rolle has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and has twice been honored by the government of Italy, where he served as American Vice Consul in Genoa from 1945 to 1948. This interview, conducted by Geoffrey Cocks (“GC”), a former student of Rolle and Peter Loewenberg, took place at Rolle’s (“AR”) home in San Marino, California, on May 29, 1997.
Geoffrey Cocks (Wed,) studied this question.