Robert Hugh 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, 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. 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. 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. 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.

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 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 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.

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