Dr. David Cohen is currently Emeritus Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. While completing his Ph.D. in African history at the University of London, he joined the Johns Hopkins History Department in 1968. Along with Jack Greene, Cohen helped to establish the Atlantic Program in History and Culture, which combined historical and anthropological approaches to the study of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Cohen describes borrowing from Philip Curtin's tropical history program at the University of Wisconsin, working with Greene, Sidney Mintz, and Richard Price, the influence of Clifford Geertz, and the Atlantic Program as an institutional and intellectual model for similar programs adopted at other universities. This oral history is part of the Hopkins Retrospective oral histories series.