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Frank Freidel

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Name
  
Frank Freidel


Role
  
Historian


Died
  
January 25, 1993, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Education
  
University of Wisconsin-Madison (1942)

Awards
  
Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada

Nominations
  
National Book Award for Nonfiction, National Book Award for History

Books
  
American History: A Survey, Franklin D Roosevelt: A Rendez, The splendid little war, The Presidents of the Uni, Over There: The Story of A

Similar People
  
Richard N Current, T Harry Williams, Alan Brinkley, Samuel Eliot Morison

Frank Burt Freidel, Jr. (May 22, 1916 – January 25, 1993) was an American historian, the first major biographer of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and one of the first scholars to work on his papers stored in the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.

Contents

Biography

Freidel was born in Brooklyn, New York of Quaker parents, and raised in Plattsburg, New York and parts of Southern California as his father struggled to support the family during the Great Depression. He received his B.A. (1937) and M.A. (1939) from the University of Southern California, then pursued his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the direction of William B. Hesseltine, graduating in 1942. His doctoral thesis was on 19th-century jurist Francis Lieber. His contemporaries at Wisconsin included Richard N. Current and T. Harry Williams, who later collectively authored with Freidel a U.S. history textbook, A History of the United States, dedicated to Hesseltine. His first academic appointment was in 1941 to Shurtleff College.

Freidel married twice, divorced once, and had seven children.

After years spent wandering to Shurtleff College, the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Vassar College, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Stanford University (1953), Freidel joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1955, and remained there until his retirement in 1981; in 1972 he was appointed the Charles Warren Professor of History. He served on the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee in 1973-1976. Following his retirement from Harvard, Freidel joined the department of history at the University of Washington, where he was [Bullitt Professor of History] in 1981-1986.

At various times Freidel was president of the Organization of American Historians, the New England History Teachers' Association, and the New England Historical Association.

Freidel's magnum opus was his 5-volume biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "The Apprenticeship" (1952), "The Ordeal" (1954), "The Triumph" (1956), "F.D.R. and the South" (1965), and "Launching the New Deal" (1973). After publishing a one-volume condensed biography Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny in 1990, Freidel died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1993 of pneumonia and cancer while living in Belmont, Massachusetts, leaving the sixth volume unfinished.

Awards and Prizes

  • 1964 Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities
  • 1966-1967 President of the New England Historical Association
  • 1975-1976 President of the Organization of American Historians
  • References

    Frank Freidel Wikipedia


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