James J. Bohning Collection

James J. Bohning was an oral historian and a historian of science and technology. Bohning was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934. He received his B.S. in chemistry from Valparaiso University (1956) and his master's degree in chemistry from New York University (1959). In 1959, Bohning began his teaching career as an instructor at Wilkes University (formerly Wilkes College) in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He took a leave of absence from Wilkes in 1962 to pursue his doctorate degree. In 1965, Bohning received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Northeastern University and returned to Wilkes as an assistant professor. In 1974, he chaired the 9th Middle Atlantic Regional Meeting (MARM) in Wilkes-Barre. While teaching at Wilkes, Bohning worked as a part-time oral historian at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1990, he retired from Wilkes as an emeritus professor after twenty-two years at the university. Bohning was an active member of the History of Chemistry Division (HIST) of the American Chemical Society (ACS), where he served as the Division's historian from 1988 to 2011 and its archivist from 1988 to 2009. He served on the ACS' National Historic Chemical Landmark Committee and was an associate editor of HIST's Bulletin for the History of Chemistry. Bohning left the Chemical Heritage Foundation in 1995 and became a staff writer for ACS News Service in Washington, D.C. In 1998, he retired from ACS and began conducting research in the history of chemistry as a CESAR Fellow at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In addition to his work at Lehigh, Bohning continued to conduct oral histories for the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Dow Foundation, and the Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society. James J. Bohning died in Newtown, Pennsylvania on September 2, 2011.