Who Rules America?  By G. William Domhoff, University of California at Santa Cruz

About Bill Domhoff

G. William Domhoff, who goes by "Bill," is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his B.A. at Duke University in 1958, his M.A. at Kent State University in 1959, and his Ph.D. at the University of Miami in 1962. He has been teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz, since 1965. In July 1993, he was promoted to Distinguished Professor, and in July 1994, he took advantage of an unexpected opportunity for an early retirement so he could devote more time to research while teaching one or two courses a year.

Four of his books are among the top 50 best sellers in sociology for the years 1950 to 1995: Who Rules America? (1967, #12); The Higher Circles (1970, #39); The Powers That Be (1979, #47); and Who Rules America Now? (1983, #43).

Most recently, Bill is the author of the 8th edition of Who Rules America? The Corporate Rich, White Nationalist Republicans, and Inclusionary Democrats in the 2020s, which was published in early 2022 and will be updated with a new Prologue in December 2022, to take the midterm elections into account.

In 2020, based in good part on previously unused archives in many different libraries, he published The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century: How They Won and Why Labor and Liberals Lost — an analysis of how the corporate rich and the power elite played key roles in important legislative achievements of the 20th century, including the National Labor Relations Act and Social Security Act in 1935, the Marshall Plan in 1948, the three pieces of legislation that expanded world trade in the 1990s, Obamacare in 2010, and many others. The Corporate Rich can be downloaded as a PDF here or purchased as a paperback. His other recent books include Diversity in the Power Elite (3rd ed., 2018, with Richard L. Zweigenhaft); The New CEOs (2011, with Richard L. Zweigenhaft); Class and Power in the New Deal (2011, with Michael Webber); and The Leftmost City (2009, with Richard Gendron). A summary of The Leftmost City — including videos and pictures from Santa Cruz's history — can be found on this website.

In 2007, Bill received the University of California's Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, which honors the post-retirement contributions of University of California faculty members.

In April 2013, Bill's research was the focus of a plenary session at the annual conference of the Urban Affairs Association.

For a complete list of Bill's publications in sociology, click here. For contact information, click here.


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