Robert H. Ferrell

Robert Hugh Ferrell (May 8, 1921 – August 8, 2018) was an American historian. He authored more than 60 books on topics including the U.S. presidency, World War I, and U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. One of the country's leading historians,

A pianist, Ferrell studied music and education at Bowling Green State University in Ohio before serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces during the Second World War as a chaplain's assistant and staff sergeant.

At Yale University, Ferrell earned a master's degree in 1948 and a Ph.D. in 1951, working under the direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Flagg Bemis. A student of the Kellogg–Briand Pact, a 1928 international agreement in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve their disputes, his dissertation The United States and the Origins of the Kellogg–Briand Pact, won Yale's John Addison Porter Prize for original scholarship.

Academic career

A longer version of the dissertation became his first book, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which went on to win the American Historical Association's 1952 George Louis Beer Prize. "This may not be the last book on the subject, but it should be," wrote historian Richard W. Leopold of Northwestern University.

In 1971, he was elected the fourth president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). He made nine appearances on C-SPAN to discuss his books and historical events, and was a featured expert in the History Channel's 2005 documentary series The Presidents. In a 2000 Chicago Sun-Times article, Ferrell ranked Abraham Lincoln, Truman and George Washington as the three best presidents in history. Many of his students became history professors themselves. His students, both Ph.D. and otherwise, included Eugene P. Trani, former president of Virginia Commonwealth University; American Spectator founder Emmett Tyrrell; William B. Pickett, a professor emeritus of history at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana Terry H. Anderson, history professor at Texas A&M University and author of The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action; Ross Gregory, history professor at Western Michigan University and author of Walter Hines Page: Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; national security and intelligence expert Melvin Goodman, author of Whistleblower at the CIA; Theodore A. Wilson, history professor at the University of Kansas and author of The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941; and John Garry Clifford, professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.

After his 1988 retirement, SHAFR named the annual Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize in his honor for distinguished scholarship in the field. More than a dozen of his former students, all historians in their own right, compiled the book Presidents, Diplomats, and Other Mortals: Essays Honoring Robert H. Ferrell to recognize his achievements in the field.

Published works Ferrell wrote prolifically, sharing with Bemis a disapproval of what they called "one-book men" who stopped writing after finishing a Ph.D. dissertation. while Alonzo L. Hamby's review in Journal of Cold War Studies called the book "restrained and gentlemanly" and noted that Ferrell viewed prominent revisionist William Appleman Williams as a friend. In a 1995 article in American Heritage, he accused Merle Miller, author of the bestselling book Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry. S. Truman, of fabricating many of the quotes attributed to Truman. In 1998's The Dying President, Ferrell examined Franklin D. Roosevelt's medical records and concluded that Roosevelt had deliberately chosen to keep the cardiovascular disease which would soon kill him secret from the public. The book was praised by historian John Lukacs as “painstaking and exceptionally researched … sparklingly well-written, bearing the marks of a master historian” and one of the most important books on Roosevelt by any historian.

Harry S. Truman Ferrell wrote voluminously on Truman, devoting more than a dozen books to his life and presidency. Ferrell's work rehabilitated the reputation of the Truman presidency, which had been previously considered a failure by scholars, by providing evidence of how decisions such as Truman's choice to champion the Marshall Plan led to the successful establishment of an American-led post-war world order.

Coincidentally, Ferrell and Truman were born on the same day, May 8.

Awards In addition to the John Addison Porter Prize and George Louis Beer Prize for his early work on the Kellogg-Briand Pact, Ferrell received the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Norman and Laura Graebner Award in 1998, which recognizes distinguished lifetime achievement by a senior historian of United States foreign relations. In 2002, Ferrell was given the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award for editing a trio of memoirs by soldier William S. Triplet, A Youth in the Meuse-Argonne, A Colonel in the Armored Divisions, and In the Philippines and Okinawa.

Personal life and death His wife, Lila, died in 2002. They had a daughter, Carolyn.

Ferrell's papers, writings and correspondence, comprising 200,000 items, are archived at Indiana University's Lilly Library.