William Hardy McNeill

We regret to announce the death, on July 8, 2016, of William Hardy McNeill,

editor of the Journal of Modern History from 1971 to 1980. One of the most dis-
tinguished historians of his generation, Bill McNeill undertook his undergraduate
studies in the College of the University of Chicago and worked with Carl Becker
for his doctorate at Cornell University. After service in the US Army during World
War II, McNeill joined the faculty of Chicago as an assistant professor of history
in 1947. He was named the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor
in 1969. McNeill served with extraordinary effectiveness as chair of the Depart-
ment of History in the 1960s, rebuilding the department, which had lost much of
its luster in the 1940s and 1950s, into a preeminent site for international historical
research. A scholar of wide and varied intellectual interests, he began his scholarly
career with work on the history of the potato in Ireland, followed by a major study
of Allied diplomacy and policy making from 1941 to 1946. Over the course of his
long and productive career, many books followed: on the history of eastern Eu-
rope, on the Venetian Empire, on plagues and disease in history, on technology
and military force, on population and politics, and on dance and drill in history,
along with biographies of Arnold Toynbee and Robert Maynard Hutchins. His
most significant work was a monumental history of the world, The Rise of the
West, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1963. McNeill had a bold
and confident mind, a restless imagination, and the uncanny ability to see pat-
terns of meaning among widely disparate historical phenomena on a global scale.
His virtues as a teacher were the same as those he displayed as an editor of the
JMH: a commitment to elegance and concision of expression and cogency of ar-
gument, as well as a habit of encouraging risk taking and bold ideas among his
students and among the colleagues whose work he published in the Journal.
Elected president of the American Historical Association in 1985—one of many
honors—McNeill was profoundly concerned about the importance of the liberal
arts in educating a responsible citizenry who would, in turn, be able to make wise
judgments about the political and social affairs of their communities and the nation.
He ardently believed that it was the responsibility of historians to present their
work in ways and in formats that would be accessible to the generally educated
public. As he argued in 1976, “a pyramid without a base is a lusus naturae; that, it
seems to me, is what the historical profession has tried to become. Small won-
der that we see the edifice tumbling down.”

John W. Boyer and Jan E. Goldstein

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