Robert Hugh Ferrell

He continued to work closely with his mentor Bemis, co-editing the later volumes of the series American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy which Bemis had begun in the 1920s, and also writing the entries on Frank B. Kellogg, Henry L. Stimson, and George Marshall.

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, Ferrell was widely considered the preeminent authority on the administration of Harry S. Truman, and also wrote books about half a dozen other 20th-century presidents.

He was thought by many in the field to be the "dean of American diplomatic historians", a title he disavowed.

Ferrell was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921 to Ernest and Edna Ferrell.

His mother was a schoolteacher; his father was a World War I veteran whose career as a banker kept the family moving throughout Ohio during the Great Depression.

The family settled in Waterville, Ohio, where Ferrell's father managed the First National Bank and Ferrell and his brother Ernest Jr. went to high school.

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.

The Ferrell home was located at 29 N. 4th Street.

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.

His wartime experience in Europe compelled him to change his vocation to the study of history, inspired also by reading the works of historian and fellow Ohioan Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Ida Tarbell, and Allan Nevins.

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 and author of Eisenhower Decides To Run; historian and author Arnold A. Offner, past president of SHAFR; Reginald Horsman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor and author of Race and Manifest Destiny; 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 the war, he received a B.S. in education from Bowling Green in 1946 and a second bachelor's degree in history in 1947.

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.

He helped edit Bemis' Pulitzer-winning 1949 biography, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, and catalyzed the publication of a 1957 paperback edition of Bemis' The Diplomacy of the American Revolution.

Ferrell was also notable for the thoroughness and depth of his research, with a knack for finding obscure or unpublished diaries, memoirs, and letters which would then become central elements of his books, such as the papers of Coolidge-era assistant secretary of state William Castle, which greatly informed Peace in Their Time.

Editing and publishing the diaries and private letters of persons of historical interest, from presidents to ordinary soldiers, became a specialty of his, with nearly two dozen such books to his name, including presidents Truman, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge (and his wife Grace) and Dwight Eisenhower, White House staffers James Hagerty, Frank Comerford Walker, Arthur F. Burns and Eben Ayers, and soldiers in the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Spanish–American War, and the Mexican–American War.

Not content to be a passive chronicler of history, Ferrell would often, when he felt a topic merited it, engage in spirited critique of other historians' interpretations of past events.

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.

Ferrell was an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Air Force in Washington, D.C., during the Korean War.

After leaving the Air Force, he taught at Michigan State in 1952–53.

He then moved to Indiana University in Bloomington, where he taught for many years, starting as an assistant professor in 1953 and rising to distinguished professor of history in 1974.

He held several notable visiting professorships, including Yale in 1955–56 and the University of Cairo in 1958–59, the universities of South Carolina, Wisconsin and Nebraska in the late 1950s, and the Naval War College in 1974.

In the influential 1955 article "Pearl Harbor and the Revisionists," he argued against the conspiracy theory that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately allowed Japan to commit the surprise attack that drew the U.S. into World War II.

His book Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists argued against post-1960s New Left historians' critiques of the Truman era.

He supervised 35 Ph.D. students from 1961 to 1988.

Many of his students became history professors themselves.

In 1964, working with Maurice Glen Baxter and John E. Wiltz, he conducted a thorough survey of every high-school history teacher and school librarian in Indiana, writing up their findings along with detailed suggestions to help unprepared teachers in the 1964 book The Teaching of American History in High Schools.

In 1971, he was elected the fourth president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).

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.

Ferrell wrote prolifically, sharing with Bemis a disapproval of what they called "one-book men" who stopped writing after finishing a Ph.D. dissertation.

He published 25 books before his 1988 retirement from teaching, and before his death had produced more than 60.

His prose was "expressed with grace and economy, [and] a light wit," wrote historian Lawrence Kaplan.

After the publication of Peace in Their Time, his early works included influential history textbooks American Diplomacy in the Great Depression and American Diplomacy: A History, the latter of which was republished in expanded and revised editions three times in the ensuing decades.

In a 2000 Chicago Sun-Times article, Ferrell ranked Abraham Lincoln, Truman and George Washington as the three best presidents in history.

Ferrell considered teaching a core part of his career, and worked to improve the quality of history teaching in general.

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.