Van Gosse teaches modern US, African American, and Cold War history at Franklin & Marshall College and is a longtime member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. He is the author of Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left; Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History; The Movements of the New Left, 1950–1975: A Brief History with Documents; and editor, with Richard Moser, of The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America. He has served as director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas and as organizing director of Peace Action, and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
