Claiborne A. Skinner Jr., Jr., Ph.D.

Claiborne A. Skinner is an instructor of History and Social Science at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1977, his MAT from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1985, and his Ph.D from UIC in 1991. Skinner first became interested in the story of French exploration while working as a deckhand on tugs on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. While researching his dissertation on the early French, he paddled 2500 miles of the canoe routes of the fur trade to better understand how the work was done.