William Romeyn Everdell is an American teacher and author. He is Dean of Humanities, Emeritus, at Saint Ann's School.

Biography

Born in 1941, he graduated from St. Paul's School and from Princeton University. A Woodrow Wilson Scholar and Fulbright Scholar, he holds a master's degree in history from Harvard University and a Ph.D from New York University. Everdell's dissertation, later published in book form, is notable for being the first work to place Jean-Jacques Rousseau within the Counter-Enlightenment, according to Graeme Garrard. In 1970, he began teaching at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where he taught world history until retiring in 2016. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and is the author of a number of books and articles on intellectual history and the history of ideas. One book, The End of Kings (1983, 2000) recaptures the historical definition of "republic" as a state not ruled by one person. Another, The First Moderns (1997) redefines "Modernism" as the abandonment of the continuous in favor of the discrete in the arts and sciences that began in the West in 1872–1913. The New York Times included The First Moderns on its list of "notable books of the year" for 1997. In 2021 Springer published his The Evangelical Counter-Enlightenment, which uses biographical profiles to argue that Wahhabi Islam, Hasidic Judaism, and "Evangelical" Protestant Christianity, which arose nearly simultaneously in the middle of the 18th century CE, are best understood as aspects of what Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment. He has also written on the teaching of history, edited the historical section of the website of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn and served on the Test Development Committee for the first Advanced Placement World History Exams. A member of the American Historical Association, he has also served as the president of the affiliated Organization of History Teachers, and of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. His wife, Barbara, was a longtime administrator at Saint Ann's, and together they have two sons, Josh and Chris.

Publications