Platt published in North Carolina History Project

     Dr. Rorin Platt’s article on eccentric North Carolina senator, Robert Rice Reynolds, was recently included in the North Carolina History Project, an edited, evolving and free online encyclopedia of North Carolina that includes commentaries, lesson plans and community calendars. Platt, who is associate professor of history at Campbell University, is an expert on intelligence history. He calls Reynolds, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1933-1945, an “atypical” southern politician because he was an isolationist and Anglophobe whose foreign policy positions alienated him from President Franklin Roosevelt. Platt’s article is titled “Senator Robert Rice Reynolds: An Atypical Tar Heel Politician and Isolationist.”
     Born in Asheville, N.C., Reynolds descended from a family of Revolutionary War heroes and pioneers, politicians and property owners. “An advocate of ‘Fortress America,’ Reynolds supported a strong national defense, naval expansion and increases in the size of the army and air force during World War II,” Platt said, “but he challenged Roosevelt’s claim that Hitler threatened American security, comparing the Fuehrer’s conquests to earlier American and British territorial expansion.”
     From 1999-2006, Dr. Rorin Platt served as Book Review Editor for “American Diplomacy,” the online journal based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also served on the board of directors for American Diplomacy Publishers since 2000.
    A native of Virginia, Platt received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Platt earned a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park. He has also studied at Georgetown University and at the University of Virginia and taught at a number of institutions. A diplomatic historian who specializes in American intelligence history, Platt has authored two books and a number of articles and book reviews. In addition, Platt served as a judge for two sessions at the annual meeting of the North Carolina Association of Historians. He is currently working on a book dealing with the history of Virginians who served in America’s World War II intelligence services titled, “Cavaliers in Cloak: Virginians in the Secret War, 1941-1945.”