Henry Farnum May (March 27, 1915 – September 29, 2012) was an American historian and Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Born in Denver, Colorado, he was reared in Berkeley, California, and spent a formative year in Europe with his family as the youngest of three children.
May was an instructor of history at Lawrence College from 1941 to 1942, and from 1942 to 1945, he served as a Japanese language translator in the United States Navy Reserve.
He taught at Berkeley from 1952 until his retirement in 1980, serving as chairman of the history department during the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
[1] May's works primarily address American intellectual and religious history, but he also wrote about his youth in Berkeley and his experiences as a graduate student at Harvard during the 1930s.