Paul Langdon Ward

Life

Ward was born in 1911 in Diyarbakir in what was then the Ottoman Empire, the son of a medical missionary. He spent much of childhood Lebanon, where he attended the American Community School. He received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1933, an M.A. from Harvard University in 1934 and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard in 1940. He was an Assistant Professor History at Russell Sage College (Troy, NY) 1941-42 before joining the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the U.S. Department of State for the duration of World War II. After the war, Ward went to China as a missionary for the Protestant Episcopal Church, teaching at Huachung University in Wuhan from 1946-50.

He returned to the U.S. to teach at Colby College (1951-53) and at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, later merged into what is now Carnegie Mellon University (1953-60). At Carnegie Tech, Ward became Chairman of the History Department. He was the fifth president of Sarah Lawrence College from 1960 to 1965. After Sarah Lawrence, Ward headed the American Historical Association (1965-74). He served on Nelson Rockefeller's Commission on the Higher Education of Women, and was active in the peace movement in the U.S. in the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and on the Joint Commission of Peace of the Episcopal Church. He also served on the Board of Directors for the Harry S Truman Library Institute, was a Fellow of the Society for Religion in Higher Education, and received honorary doctorates from Amherst College, Bard College and Clark University.

Ward was the author of William Lambarde's Collections on Chancery (1953), A Style of History for Beginners(1959), Confrontation and Learned Societies (with John Voss, 1970), Elements of Historical Thinking (1971) and Studying History: An Introduction to Methods and Structure (1985).