Joel Colton was born in New York City. A graduate of the City College of New York, he served as a military intelligence officer in Europe in World War II, and received his PhD from Columbia University in 1950. He served on the faculty of Duke University for more than four decades, chairing the History Department from 1967 to 1974 and chairing the university's academic council from 1971 to 1973. On leave from Duke, he served from 1974 to 1981 with the Rockefeller Foundation in New York as director of its research and fellowship program in the humanities. In 1986 Duke voted him a distinguished teaching award. He received Guggenheim, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies, and Historical Abstracts, and was co-president of the International Commission on the History of Social Movements and Social Structures. In 1979 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writings include Compulsory Labor Arbitration in France, 1936- 1939 (1951), Lï¿on Blum: Humanist in Politics (1966, 1987), for which he received a Mayflower Award; Twentieth Century (1968, 1980) in the Time-Life Great Ages of Man series; and numerous contributions to journals, encyclopedias, and collaborative volumes. He died in 2011, having served as the distinguished co-author of A History of the Modern World for every revision after the first edition.
