Dr. Greg Bradsher, a 1973 (MA) and 1984 (PhD) alumnus of the UMass Amherst Department of History, was presented with the prestigious National Archives Lifetime Achievement Award on June 19, 2019 in Washington, DC after a 42+ year career at the National Archives.
National Archives Program Director Miriam Kleiman reports that Bradsher’s UMass dissertation, “Preserving the Revolution: Civil-Military Relations During the American War for Independence,” was a generative starting point for his career at the archives. Highlights of this work include authoring the official guide to Holocaust-related records at the National Archives and a 1,166-page tome on the National Archives’ holdings related to the Nazi Gold investigation.
Through these endeavors, Bradsher became a internationally-recognized expert on Holocaust restitution and research and on using National Archivers records for art provenance research. He has testified before Congress; represented the United States at international conferences in England, Switzerland, and Lithuania; appeared on The History Channel, C-Span and other media; spoken at numerous universities and conferences; organized an international symposium on Holocaust-era assets records and research; edited, co-authored or contributed to several books; and published in a broad swath of journals.
“It has been an honor to work so closely with Dr. Greg Bradsher,” commented archivist Sylvia Naylor of the National Archives at College Park. “He is the perfect combination of scholar and archivist. His knowledge of the records never ceases to amaze me.”