Eric Abrahamson is a business consultant and economic historian who has researched and written about for-profit and non-profit organizations and communities in the United States and Canada. He has also worked on the development of museums for communities, tribes, and business organizations.

Abrahamson is president of Vantage Point Historical Services, Inc. He serves as chairman of the South Dakota State Library Board and president of the Rapid City Public Library Foundation. He is first vice president of the Rapid City Board of Education. He is the vice chairman of the Black Hills Area Community Foundation. He was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in South Dakota in 2006.

The great-grandson of Norwegian immigrants who homesteaded in western South Dakota in 1905, Abrahamson grew up in California and first moved to South Dakota in 1980. Between 1980 and 1984, he co-owned a small restaurant in Rapid City, co-founded the arts organization BackRoom Productions, and taught as a writer-in-the-schools in many communities throughout the state. Returning to California in 1984, Abrahamson earned a masters degree in English from San Francisco State University and launched his business. In 1994, he moved to Maryland to begin work on a Ph.D. in American History at Johns Hopkins University.

Married to Lois Facer in 1986, Eric and Lois have two sons: Reed and Zachary. Eric returned to the Black Hills with his family in 1998. Lois has been associated with National American University as a member of the faculty and as the former Academic Dean for more than ten years. Reed and Zachary graduated from Stevens High School.

Eric is the author of a number of book-length works including Persistence and Perspective: Franklin Templeton Investments, the First Sixty Years (Franklin Templeton Investments, 2007) and Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World (Cambridge University Press, 2002) co-written with Dr. Louis Galambos.

Currently, he is working on a book entitled The New Pioneers: Rural America, the Internet and the Next Chapter in the American Dream which explores the lives and livelihoods of digital pioneers on the northern Great Plains. He is also writing a history of the Black Hills Corporation to celebrate the company’s 125^th anniversary in 2008.