T. Harry Williams

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Thomas Harry Williams (May 19, 1909 -- July 6, 1979) was an award-winning historian at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge whose career began in 1941 and extended for thirty-eight years until his death. A popular faculty member, Williams is perhaps best known for his American Civil War study, Lincoln and His Generals, a "Book of the Month" selection from 1952, and his 1969 work Huey Long, winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Williams was born in Vinegar Hill, Illinois, to William D. Williams and the former Emma Necollins. He was educated in the schools of the village of Hazel Green, Wisconsin, in Grant County in the southwestern corner of the state. Thereafter, Williams obtained his bachelor's degree in 1931 from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville (then "Platteville State College") in Platteville. He thereafter obtained his master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1932 and 1937, respectively. He first instructed history in the extension division of UW from 1936-1938. He then accepted a professorship at the University of Omaha in Nebraska from 1938-1941. Then he came to LSU, where he was anchored for the remainder of his career. In 1952, he married the former Estelle Skolfield (1908-1999), and they had one daughter, Mrs. John J. Doles.

Willliams was a Gugenheim Fellow in 1957 and was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Queen's College, a college of Oxford University in Great Britain from 1966-1967. He was president of the Southern Historical Association from 1958-1959 and of the Organization of American Historians from 1972-1973.

On Williams' death, the LSU Board of Supervisors established the T. Harry Williams Chair of American History. There is also the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at LSU. Williams guest lectured at more than fifty separate colleges in the United States and Europe. He participated in countless Civil War Round Tables. In 1964, he received the Harry S. Truman Award in Civil War History. He received the Doctor of Humane Letters from Loyola University and Tulane University, both in New Orleans, in 1974 and 1979, respectively.

A stimulating lecturer, Williams routinely taught overflow numbers of students in auditorium-sized classrooms. He was said to have been a stern taskmaster but a mentor to several generations of graduate students. He wrote more than twenty scholarly books, co-authored with Richard Current and Frank Freidel, a standard text in American history survey courses, edited seven works, and published more than forty articles and some 325 book reviews.

Other acclaimed works included: Lincoln and the Radicals (1941), P.G.T. Beauregard, Napoleon in Gray (1955), Romance and Realism in Southern Politics (1961), McClellan, Sherman, and Grant (1962), and posthumously History of American Wars (1981).

Williams is interred in Roselawn Cemetery in Baton Rouge.