Internship Details

To honor Dr. David Chalmers’s love of history, his family established a fund through the Community Foundation of North Central Florida to benefit the Matheson. In both the fall and spring semesters, the Matheson offers a paid internship to students at Santa Fe College and the University of Florida. This position will learn how to preserve and display local history by working with the Matheson’s collections.

  • Open to students currently enrolled in the history program at the University of Florida or Santa Fe College
  • Gain experience working with archival/research collections
  • 5 hrs/week for 10 weeks
  • Flexible schedule
  • $1200 stipend

David Chalmers, Ph.D. (1927-2020)

A man with a white mustache wearing glasses and a hat

Dr. David Chalmers prided himself on being first and foremost a classroom teacher during his 39 years with the University of Florida. He was named the University’s “Faculty-Teacher Scholar,” and in a campus-wide poll was selected as one of the University’s “eight top teachers.” In 1970, he was one of only a handful of teachers across the country to receive the Danforth Foundation’s E. Harris Harbison Award for Gifted Teaching. His fellow professors elected him President Pro Tem of the Arts and Sciences Faculty Assembly, and he served as Chair of the University President’s Faculty Educational Policy Group.

He was best known nationally, though, as a scholar of American social and intellectual history. A leading authority on the Ku Klux Klan, his book Hooded Americanism: A History of the Ku Klux Klan has remained in print continuously since 1965.

His other books include Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement; And The Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s; Neither Socialism Nor Monopoly: Theodore Roosevelt and the Decision to Regulate the Railroads; The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers; The Muckrake Years; and A Brief History of the American People, which he wrote for Japanese students of American history.

David taught as a Fulbright Scholar or Exchange Professor at the University of Ceylon, the University of Tokyo (Todai), the University of the Philippines, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Genova, and as a lecturer in a dozen other countries.

David was born in Washington, D.C. in 1927. He served in the United States Army and was stationed in Europe at the close of World War Il. He received his B.A. with High Honors and Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College, and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

David wooed Jean to Gainesville with a promise that she would be on the front lines of social change, and together they were. The two spent more than a decade actively involved in the civil rights movement. David went to jail in St. Augustine as part of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to desegregate local businesses and combat Klan and police violence there. Jean was President of the Gainesville Women for Equal Rights, Florida’s second largest civil rights organization, and later President of the national organization, The Southern Regional Council.

A woman with brown hearing wearing a red dress and white jacket standing next to a man with glasses wearing black pants and a blue sport coat.
A woman with white hair wearing a striped cardigan standing next to a man with white hair and glasses wearing black pants and a gray sport coat.

Together with Jean, David raised two children. Their daughter, Kim Sita Chalmers, is a violin teacher and a Realtor. She delighted David with her violin playing, and they share a profound love of classical music. Their son, Henry Ross Chalmers, is an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rebecca Franco Chalmers, have two children, David Saul Franco Chalmers, and Sarina Ria Franco Chalmers.