Robert H. Ferrell, a Historian of Breadth and Clarity, Has Died. He Was 97.

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The historian Robert H. Ferrell, who died Aug. 8 at the age of 97, taught generations of students at Indiana University how to join a subject and predicate to make a respectable sentence and how to combine two or more such sentences to form a presentable paragraph. Or at least he tried. 

He taught by instruction and example alike. “Young man,” Ferrell addressed John Lewis Gaddis, the future historian of the Cold War, at their first meeting, having just read a draft of Mr. Gaddis’s dissertation, “you must always remember, when you write, ‘on the other hand,’ to tell us what the first hand was.”

I was a student of Ferrell’s in the spring of 1968 and an acolyte from that time forward. One fine day the open windows of the lecture hall in which the slight, bespectacled professor was conducting a survey course in American diplomatic history admitted the sound of screeching automobile tires. Turning to observe the offending vehicle, Ferrell mused, “I wonder how many books the price of that car would buy?”

He himself owned some 10,000 volumes. He wrote or edited more than 60, beginning in 1952 with “Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact,” his doctoral dissertation, which won Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize and the admiration of seasoned historians of diplomacy. “This may not be the last book on the subject, but it should be,” wrote Richard W. Leopold.

Of Ferrell, as of the journalist A.J. Liebling, it could be said that he wrote faster than anyone who wrote better, and better than anyone who wrote faster. Born in 1921, he returned from service in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945 to pursue his studies in the history of American foreign relations. At Yale, he earned a doctorate in 1951 under the mentorship of Samuel Flagg Bemis, the historian of American diplomacy and biographer of John Quincy Adams. Given a year to write his dissertation, Ferrell finished in eight months and enrolled in a Russian language course to occupy the spare time. ...