William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian "whose books cemented the place of Franklin D. Roosevelt among the greatest American presidents," died January 28, the New York Times reported. He was 102. His first book, published in 1953, was on the politics of flood control, while his final work, From George Washington to John Quincy Adams, was published last year.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963), generally regarded as his masterpiece, was awarded the Bancroft Prize by Columbia University and the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians.
Leuchtenburg's other major books include The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (1958) and The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (1995). He published In the Shadow of FDR in 1983, and updated it several times, taking it up to the administration of President Barack Obama.
He taught for three decades at Columbia University and for two more at the University of North Carolina before he was given emeritus status there. He served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Historians, and the American Historical Association.
For more than 40 years, Leuchtenburg was a close adviser and friend to filmmaker Ken Burns, appearing in three of his documentaries: Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), and Benjamin Franklin (2022), as well as consulting on many others.
After learning of Leuchtenburg's death, Burns told the Times: "I had to get up and go be by myself for a while. Everything just crashed to a halt." Burns called him "one of the great historians, if not the dean of American historians in the United States, for his work on the presidency."
Burns added: "I'm going to cry talking about it, but it's just this gigantic and unfillable hole. He taught us well, though. He's imparted not just facts, but attitudes and relationships and methodologies that we'll save. We'll be poorer for not having Bill to come and look at a rough cut of something that he shouldn't know anything about but then inevitably knows a ton. We'll muddle through."
The Associated Press noted that in recent years, Leuchtenburg continued to work every morning and, at age 101, completed Patriot Presidents, the first of a planned multi-volume history that he acknowledged in the book's preface "may be too ambitious."