William Appleman Williams

American · 1921 to 1990

Born on June 12, 1921, near Atlantic, Iowa, William Appleman Williams lost his father, an Army Air Corps officer, in a plane crash when he was seven, and grew up with an early, almost inherited relationship to American military life. He trained at Kemper Military School in Missouri before entering the United States Naval Academy, graduating with an engineering degree and a commission as ensign in 1945. He served in the South Pacific as executive officer aboard a landing ship during the final months of the war, until a back injury ended his hopes of becoming a naval aviator; he requested a medical discharge in 1946. Williams then turned to history, earning a master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1950 at the University of Wisconsin under Fred Harvey Harrington, absorbing there the economic interpretation of American history associated with Charles Beard. After teaching posts at Washington and Jefferson College, Ohio State University and the University of Oregon, he returned to Wisconsin in 1957 and became the central figure of what came to be called the Wisconsin School of diplomatic history. His book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) argued that the United States had expanded as an empire behind the language of freedom, a thesis he broadened across three centuries in The Contours of American History (1961). His students founded the journal Studies on the Left in 1959, a forerunner of the New Left, and by the late 1960s his ideas had made him one of that movement's most read historians, though he grew uneasy with its more militant turns. In 1968 he left Wisconsin for Oregon State University, seeking to teach undergraduates and live among what he called ordinary Americans by the sea. He served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 1980 and died in Newport, Oregon, on March 5, 1990, at sixty eight.