Arnold Strickon was born in New York City in July of 1930. He attended City College of New York and earned his B.A. in 1952 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1954. He served in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956 and then returned to Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. in 1960. He did anthropological field work in both the Caribbean and Argentina as well as teaching at Fordham University and Brandeis University before becoming employed at the University of Wisconsin in 1965.
Throughout his career, Strickon specialized in Latin America. However, in the 1970s, he did field work in rural Vernon County, Wisconsin. He found that most studies in ethnicity had been done in urban environments on the East Coast, but he wanted to observe ethnicity in a rural setting. He chose Vernon County as his rural Wisconsin study site because it had a variety of ethnic groups located close to each other and because these groups were involved in the same types of activity, namely tobacco and dairy farming. Funded by the National Institute for Mental Health, his field work involved interviewing Vernon County residents from various ethnic backgrounds (Yankees, Norwegians, Czechs, Italians, and Germans), conducting a survey, and observing community festivals. He documented his field work with color slides and black and white photographs.
