Eric is the founder, president, and principal historian of Vantage Point. Over the last three decades he has written numerous histories of major corporations and cultural institutions in telecommunications, banking, food processing, construction, philanthropy and the arts, as well as several successful biographies.
Eric earned his PhD in American Economic History at the Johns Hopkins University in 2003. He is the author of a number of books and both fiction and non-fiction essays. His books include Beyond Charity: A Century of Philanthropic Innovation (Vantage Point Press, 2013), Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream (University of California Press, 2013), Improving Life With Energy: The First 125 Years of Black Hills Corporation (Vantage Point Press, 2008).
He is the coauthor of Democracy & Philanthropy: The Rockefeller Foundation and the American Experiment (with Barbara Shubinski and Sam Hurst, Vantage Point Press, 2013); Spirited Commitment: The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation (with Roderick McLeod, McGill-Queens University Press, 2010); and Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World (with Louis Galambos, Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Eric was the co-winner of the 2016 Excellence in Consulting Award from the National Council on Public History.
Lois Facer, MA
Chief Operating Officer, Research Associate, and Editor
A former academic dean, Lois taught English as a second language at the University of Maryland, San Francisco State University and National American University. She holds an M.A. in English with an emphasis in TESOL from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in English from the University of California, San Diego.
She was the co-winner of the 2016 Excellence in Consulting Award from the National Council on Public History.
Our Collaborators
Sam Hurst
Author and Videographer
Sam Hurst is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentarian. He is the author of Rattlesnake Under His Hat: The Life and Times of Earl Brockelsby (Vantage Point Press, 2016) and Frontier Industrialists: Fifty Years of Innovation at L&H (Vantage Point Press, 2014).
In 1992, as a producer for NBC News, he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard University, where he studied evolutionary biology. Following his retirement from NBC News, Hurst and his family moved to the Black Hills where he owned and operated a buffalo ranch and continued to produce independent documentary movies.
Hurst’s films include The Coming Plague for Turner Broadcasting, A Falconer’s Memoir and Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb for PBS, Good Meat, for Native American Public Television and Lakota Star Knowledge for the Journey Museum with a grant from NASA. Hurst has written extensively about food and agriculture policy and South Dakota culture and politics, and for several years was a Sunday columnist for The Rapid City Journal.
Randal Iverson
Videographer
Randal has worked in cinematography, editing and marketing for a number of years. He managed a video production department for a marketing agency, and has worked in various capacities for companies such as National Geographic TV, Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, and the Country Music Channel. He operates a video production company called Iverson Productions.
Eric John Abrahamson, PhD
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