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Books|William E. Leuchtenburg, Scholar of F.D.R. and the Presidency, Dies at 102
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/books/william-e-leuchtenburg-dead.html
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His writings, which stretched across eight decades, helped Americans understand a president who transformed the office and shaped the postwar years.
Jan. 29, 2025Updated 3:26 p.m. ET
William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian whose books cemented the place of Franklin D. Roosevelt among the greatest American presidents, died on Tuesday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 102.
His death was confirmed by Miguel La Serna, chairman of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Mr. Leuchtenburg was a professor emeritus.
A prolific scholar whose writings stretched across eight decades — his first book, on the politics of flood control, appeared in 1953, and his final one, on the first six presidents of the United States, was published last year — Mr. Leuchtenburg helped Americans make sense of the head-spinning changes that had transformed their nation and the world within living memory.
Like his contemporaries Richard Hofstadter, Edmund S. Morgan, John M. Blum and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. — a lifelong friend — Mr. Leuchtenburg shaped America’s conception of its past during the prosperous 1950s and ’60s. His orientation was broadly liberal and internationalist, though he anticipated and responded to criticisms of Roosevelt from the New Left and from the ascendant conservative movement.
The work generally regarded as his masterpiece is “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940,” published in 1963, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize by Columbia University and the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians.
“He took an office which had lost much of its prestige and power in the previous 12 years and gave it an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done,” Mr. Leuchtenburg wrote, chronicling the enormous growth of the federal government under Franklin Roosevelt, his innovative use of radio and newspaper reporters to communicate his message, and his ability to make Americans feel “the kind of trust they would normally express for a warm and understanding father who comforted them in their grief or safeguarded them from harm.”
