Robert George Leeson Waite (February 18, 1919 – October 4, 1999) was a Canadian historian, psychohistorian, and the Brown Professor of History (1949–1988) at Williams College who specialized in the Nazi movement, particularly Adolf Hitler.
[1] When describing his life, he captured the flavor of these small towns, adopting the cadence, regional expressions, and accents of the Scandinavian farmers and the families with whom he grew up.
To supplement his scholarship and to earn whatever spending money he could, Waite held a variety of jobs, from working in the open pit mines of the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota to guarding the supposed corpse of John Wilkes Booth in a traveling carnival.
[2] Waite's interest in psychohistory was influenced in part by his own experience during his first year of teaching at Williams College, where he suffered from depression—what he called "black despair."
Relying on their own words not only gave his readers access to the Freikorpsmen's psychological and political universe, it also allowed Waite to scrutinize them more accurately and in context.