a Jewish American historian of the social history of ideas, born in Berlin as Peter Joachim Fröhlich . After witnessing Kristallnacht (better: Pogromnacht) in 1938, he fled Nazi Germany in 1939. His family initially booked passage on the SS St. Louis (whose passengers were eventually denied visas) but fortuitously changed their booking to an earlier voyage to the U.S. He came to the United States in 1941 and took American citizenship in 1946. Gay received his education at the University of Denver, where he was awarded a BA in 1946 and at Columbia University where he was awarded an MA in 1947 and PhD in 1951. Gay worked as political science professor at Columbia between 1948-1955 and as history professor from 1955-1969. He taught at Yale from 1969 until his retirement in 1993. He married Ruth Slokin (d. 2006) in 1959 and has adopted three step-children. Gay's first interest was in intellectual history. His 1959 book, Voltaire's Politics examined Voltaire as a politician and the how his politics influenced the ideas that Voltaire championed in his writings. Gay followed the success of Voltaire's Politics with a wider history of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, for which he was honored with a National Book prize and the Mecher Book prize. Gay's 1968 book, Weimar Culture was considered at the time to be a ground-breaking cultural history of the Weimar Republic. Starting in 1978 with Freud, Jews and Other Germans, an examination of the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture, Gay has become increasingly interested in psychology. Many of his works focus on the social impact of psychoanalysis. Gay is a leading champion of Psychohistory, and is a follower of Sigmund Freud. Educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium in Berlin. Taught at Columbia University & at Yale University. Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University (retired 1993).