Robert Hugh Ferrell
One of the country's leading historians,[4] Ferrell was widely considered the preeminent authority on the administration of Harry S. Truman,[5] and also wrote books about half a dozen other 20th-century presidents.
[7][8] 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.
[5] His wartime experience in Europe compelled him to change his vocation to the study of history,[4] inspired also by reading the works of historian and fellow Ohioan Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Ida Tarbell, and Allan Nevins.
[4][9] 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.
[11] 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.
[24] 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.
[25][6] Ferrell was also notable for the thoroughness and depth of his research, with a knack for finding obscure or unpublished diaries, memoirs, and letters which would then become central elements of his books, such as the papers of Coolidge-era assistant secretary of state William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.
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.
[18] 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.
[3][27] Reactions to the book were divided: Writing for Michigan State University's H-Net, Curt Cardwell felt that Ferrell misunderstood the arguments of the younger generation he criticized and was "condescending,"[28] 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.
His books on the conflict include America's Deadliest Battle, Collapse at Meuse-Argonne, and a profile of the American Expeditionary Forces' only African-American division, Unjustly Dishonored, as well as several edited memoirs of soldiers who served in it.
[34] 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.
[35] 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.
