Howard Shelton Stromquist was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, on May 31, 1943. In the spring of 1961 he graduated from Rich Township High School in Park Forest, Illinois, was awarded a scholarship to Yale University, and enrolled there in September 1961. In 1963, he joined the Experiment in International Living of Putney, Vermont, and was sent to New Delhi, India, on an exchange basis for two months. He spent the 1963--1964 academic year studying philosophy at Heidelberg University.
Stromquist spent the summer of 1964 working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He continued to work for civil rights when he returned to Yale, and was named head of the Yale Civil Rights Council in 1965.
He received his B.A. in history from Yale in June 1966. One month later he went to Tanzania as a volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), where he spent the next two years. While in Tanzania, Stromquist met and married his wife, Ann.
Stromquist continued to work with the AFSC on his return, accepting the position of program director of the Milwaukee office in September 1968. He worked with the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV, an organization of those who worked abroad with the Peace Corps, AFSC, the International Voluntary Service, and church groups), while he was based in Milwaukee, spending two months living and working in Cuba. He also volunteered as a tutor at the Milwaukee Area Free University, teaching a class on the economic power structure of Milwaukee.
The AFSC position ran out of funds in 1970 while he was working on a demonstration against Joseph H. Blatchford's policies as director of the Peace Corps. In 1971 Stromquist enrolled as a graduate student in American social history at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the Pitt Professional Union and worked to secure better working conditions for university graduate assistants and employees. He also became involved with the South Side community, and with the Indochina Peace Campaign.
He was awarded his M.A. in 1973. In 1974 he was named a teaching fellow as he started work on his Ph.D. He joined the Pittsburgh chapter of the New American Movement at this time, spending a year working on a campaign to convert Pittsburgh's Duquesne Light Company into a publicly owned utility.
Stromquist moved to southwestern Wisconsin to do dissertation research in November 1975, and took a position with the Wisconsin Coulee Region Community Action Program, an anti-poverty agency. The agency was being reorganized, and he did extensive research on organizational structure for the Technical. Assistance Planning Group. Stromquist left his job the following year when he was awarded an Andrew Mellon Fellowship to support his dissertation research.
He continued to live in Wisconsin for the next four years, except for work as a Newberry Library Fellow in Residence, January-March 1977. While in Wisconsin, Stromquist worked for environmental issues. He first became involved in the fight to stop the Dairyland Power Cooperative's Mississippi River powerline. This interest widened, and he became active in various anti-nuclear organizations, particularly with Citizens for Safe Energy (CSE) of Gays Mills, Wisconsin. He helped with the Kickapoo Exchange Food Coop, and started his own group to discuss issues of interest to the rural community, including soil conservation, nuclear power, and absentee land owners.
Stromquist worked as a Local History Coordinator for the Wisconsin State Historical Society between 1978 and 1981. He received his Ph.D. in American social history in 1981 from the University of Pittsburgh and then accepted an appointment in the history department at the University of Iowa.
