Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Patrick Diggins was an American historian born on the 1st of April 1935, in San Francisco, who taught at the University of California Irvine, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and held visiting posts at Cambridge and Princeton. He wrote more than a dozen books on U.S. intellectual history, covering subjects from fascism and communism to Ronald Reagan and Reinhold Niebuhr. He died on the 28th of January 2009.
Diggins argued in his book "Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History" that Reagan was a genuinely liberal figure rather than a conservative one, calling him "one of the three or four truly great presidents in U.S. history." He credited reading Reagan's personal writings, released after Reagan's death, with changing his mind. His earlier view, formed during the Berkeley protests of the 1960s, had been sharply negative.
Diggins won the John H. Dunning Prize in 1972 for his book "Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America," which examined the Italian dictator's popularity among Americans before the Second World War.
Diggins taught at San Francisco State College from 1963 to 1969, then at the University of California Irvine from 1969 to 1990, and finally at the CUNY Graduate Center from 1990 until his death. He also held the chair in American Civilization at the Ecole des hautes etudes in Paris for a year and was a visiting professor at Cambridge and Princeton.
Diggins earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, became a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in 1989, and was nominated for the National Book Award for History. He was a member of the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, and the American Philosophical Society.
Diggins' last book was "Why Niebuhr Now?," which examined the shifting political loyalties of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It was published posthumously in 2011, two years after Diggins died in January 2009.