Subdivision
| • | 303. History Since 1715 | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. James H. Billington | | | Institution: | Library of Congress | | | Year Elected: | 1988 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | November 20, 2018 | | | | | | |
James H. Billington served as the Librarian of Congress beginning in 1987. Born in Bryn Mawr, PA, he attended Princeton University and earned his D.Phil. degree in 1953 from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College. Following service in the military, Dr. Billington taught history at Harvard University (1957-62) and Princeton University (1962-74). In late 1973, Dr. Billington became director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, founding both the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russia Studies as well as the Wilson Quarterly during his fourteen-year tenure at the Center. His publications in the field of Russian history and culture included The Face of Russia (1998), a companion book to a three-part PBS television series of the same title narrated and written by Dr. Billington, and Russia in Search of Itself (2004). Dr. Billington received forty honorary degrees as well as the Woodrow Wilson Award of Princeton University and the UCLA Medal. He was a member of the Board of Foreign Scholarships (1971-76; chairman, 1973-75), which administers the Fulbright Exchange Program worldwide. He was the founder and Chairman of the Board of the Open World Exchange program. He received state honors from the governments of Brazil, Italy, Germany, the Republic of Korea, and the Kyrgz Republic, as well as the highest honors awarded to foreigners by France (The Legion of Honor) and Russia (The Order of Friendship). He championed the addition of digital collections to traditional analog materials and services to the Library of Congress and gained UNESCO backing in 2007 for a new World Digital Library of original and important primary materials from the world's varied cultures. Dr. Billington served on the Board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1988. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Peter Paret | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1988 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | September, 11, 2020 | | | | | | |
Peter Paret was Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University. His principal areas of research were the history of war, particularly in the 18th and early 19th century, and the history of European culture from the 18th to the 20th century. He was born in Berlin in 1924 and is a graduate of the University of London (Ph.D., 1960). Before joining the Institute in 1986, he held positions at Princeton University, the University of California, Davis, and Stanford University. In the academic year 2008-09 he gave the Lees Knowles Lectures on the History of War at Cambridge University - the expanded text of which was published in 2009 - and organized an exhibition on the work of the sculptor Ernst Barlach that opened on March 1, 2009 at the Art Museum of Princeton University. Among his ten monographs are Clausewitz and the State (1976); The Berlin Secession (1980); Art as History (1988); and An Artist Against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-38. He has also published two volumes of essays: Understanding War (1992) and German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 (2001). In 2012 he coauthored Myth and Modernity: Barlach's Drawings on the Nibelungen with Helga Thieme. He was awarded the Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013, having been an officer of the Order for the past decade. In 2017 he won the Pritzker Literature Award. He died in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 11, 2020 at age 96. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Fritz Stern | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 1988 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | May 18, 2016 | | | | | | |
One of America's best known historians, Fritz Stern was University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he taught since receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1953. Dr. Stern's prime field of interest was modern Germany, in which he had explored the financial policy that underlay Bismarck's program of national unification, contributed to intellectual history and modern historiography, and examined the connection between intellectual and political developments. He was also particularly concerned with the rise of natural science and its impact on government policy and politics in connection with his editorial work on the Einstein Papers and the history of the Max Planck Institutes. The author of books such as The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology (1961), The Responsibility of Power (1967) and Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire (1977), Dr. Stern also served on the editorial board of Foreign Affairs for many years. He had been honored with a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lionel Trilling Award and membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2006 he published Five Germanys I Have Known, a look back at the many incarnations of his native land. In 2007 he received the Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History from the APS in recognition of that book. Fritz Stern died at his home in Manhattan on May 18, 2016, at the age of 90. | |
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