Darrel E. Bigham is the Director of Historic Southern Indiana and Professor of History, University of Southern Indiana.
Darrel Bigham has been a member of the faculty of the University of Southern Indiana since the summer of 1970, when he received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas.
A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he was educated in that city's public schools. He graduated from Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, in 1964, and during the following year was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. He married Mary Elizabeth Hitchcock of New York City in September 1965. He was a graduate student at the University of Kansas until 1970, when he earned his Ph.D. in history. In July of that year, they moved to Evansville, Indiana, where he had accepted a teaching position at what was then the Evansville campus of Indiana State University-now the University of Southern Indiana.
Their two children were born in Lawrence-Matthew in 1966, and Elizabeth in 1968. Both of them were educated in the Evansville public schools and received their higher education in the Northeast--Matt at Yale, where he remained to receive his medical degree and complete his residency in anesthesiology, and Liz at Barnard and Columbia, where she completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history. Matt is on the medical staff at Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis. Liz is a vice president of Jack Morton International in New York. Both are married--Matt to Elizabeth Belle and Liz to David Hotson. Each couple has two sons: Russell and Sam Bigham, and Ethan and John Darrel (Jack) Hotson.
His involvement in civic affairs has been as extensive as his professional activities and his writing. He has organized and/or been president of a variety of Evansville organizations--the Vanderburgh County Historical Society, the Evansville Arts and Education Council, the Metropolitan Evansville Progress Committee, the Evansville Museum, and Leadership Evansville, for which (1976-1979) he was the first executive director. He chaired the Evansville committee that observed the American Revolution Bicentennial during 1974-1977 and the committee that organized the city's 175th anniversary celebration in 1987. He also created and for many years provided leadership for the Education Committee of the Rotary Club of Evansville. He organized and chaired the Indiana Council for History Education (1991-2002) and was president of the Indiana Association of Historians (1999-2000).
He is the author of a number of books, most of which examine urbanization and race in the Midwest and upper South. His most recent book, On Jordan's Banks: Emancipation and its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley, was published in November 2005 (University Press of Kentucky).
Appointed by the President on the recommendation of the Governor of Indiana
