G. William Domhoff

Early life

Domhoff was born in Youngstown, Ohio and raised in Rocky River, 12 miles from Cleveland. His parents were George William Domhoff Sr., a loan executive, and Helen S. (Cornett) Domhoff, a secretary at George Sr.'s company.

In high school, Domhoff was a three-sport athlete (in baseball, basketball, and football), wrote for his school newspaper's sports section, served on student council, and won a contest to be the batboy for the Cleveland Indians. He graduated as co-valedictorian.^[1]

Education

Domhoff received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at Duke University (1958), where he finished freshman year as sixth in his class, wrote for the Duke Chronicle, played baseball as an outfielder, and tutored the student athletes. As an undergraduate, he also wrote for The Durham Sun and received his Phi Beta Kappa key.^[1] He later earned a Master of Arts in Psychology at Kent State University (1959), and a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Miami (1962).^[2]

Family

Domhoff has four children; his son-in-law is former Major League Baseball player Glenallen Hill^[1][3].

Academia

In the early 1960s, Domhoff was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. In 1965, he joined the founding faculty^[4] of the University of California, Santa Cruz as an Assistant Professor at Cowell College; he became an Associate Professor in 1969, a Professor in 1976, and a Distinguished Professor in 1993. After his retirement in 1994, he has continued to publish and teach classes.^[1]

Over the course of his career at UCSC, Domhoff served in many capacities at various times: Acting Dean of the Division of Social Sciences,^[5] chair of the Sociology Department, chair of the Academic Senate, chair of the Committee on Academic Personnel, and chair of the Statewide Committee on Preparatory Education.^[1]

In 2007, he received the University of California's Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, which honors the post-retirement contributions of UC faculty.^[1]

Sociology

Domhoff's first book, Who Rules America? (1967), was a 1960s sociological best-seller^[1], arguing that the United States is dominated by an elite ownership class, both politically and economically.^[6] Who Rules was followed by a series of sociology and power structure books like C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (1968), Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats (1978), and three more best-sellers: The Higher Circles (1970), The Powers That Be (1979), and Who Rules America Now? (1983).^[1]

Domhoff has written six updates to Who Rules America?; every edition has been used as a sociology textbook. In 2017, he contributed to Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America, a collection of essays and critiques.^[7] He also has a "Who Rules America?" Web site, hosted by UCSC.^[8]

Psychology

In addition to his work in sociology, Domhoff is a pioneer in scientific dream research.^[9] In the 1960s, he worked closely with Calvin S. Hall, who had developed a content analysis system for dreams. He has continued scientific studies of dream content up to the present day, and his latest research advocates a neurocognitive basis for future dream research.^[10]

He and his research partner maintain two web sites dedicated to quantitative dream research: DreamResearch.net and DreamBank.net.

Sociology

• Who Rules America?, 1st ed. (1967). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  • Who Rules America Now?, 4th ed. (1983). New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Who Rules America? Power, Politics, and Social Change, 5th ed. (2006). New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance, 6th ed. (2010). New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich 7th ed. (2014). New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • Looseleaf for Who Rules America? (2015). New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America (2017). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
• C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (1968). Boston: Beacon Press.
• The Higher Circles (1970). New York: Random House.
• Fat Cats and Democrats. The Role of the Big Rich in the Party of the Common Man (1972). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness (1974). New York: Harper & Row./ ISBN 0-06-131880-9
• Who Really Rules?: New Haven and Community Power Reexamined (1978 & 2010). Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
• The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domination in America (1978). New York: Random House.
• Power Structure Research (1980). Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications.
• The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America (1990). New York: Transaction Publishers.
• State Autonomy Or Class Dominance? : Case Studies on Policy Making in America (1996). New York: Transaction Publishers.
• Changing the Powers that Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win (2003). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (2012). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Psychology

• Differentiation of Productive and Non-Productive Character Orientations (1959). Master of Arts in Psychology, Kent State University.
• The Mystique of Dreams: A Search for Utopia Through Senoi Dream Theory (1990). Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach (1996). New York: Plenum Publishing.
• The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis (2003). Washington: American Psychological Association Press.
• The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and the Default Network (2018). New York: Oxford University Press.