Ernest R. May
Ernest R. May was born on November 19, 1928, in Fort Worth, Texas, the child of an American father and a Mexican-American mother who was descended from one of the great Hispanic families of Texas. Spanish was the second among the many languages Ernest would learn. His childhood was not always easy, and his path to scholarly excellence was very much self-made. He studied at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he received both his bachelor’s degree (1948) and a doctorate (1951). He then served in the Navy briefly before coming to Harvard University as an assistant professor of history in 1954. He was tenured five years later, when he was not quite thirty years old. For more than fifty years, he taught courses on the history of U.S. foreign relations as well as on more specialized topics such as the history of the Vietnam War and of civil-military relations. He also offered graduate seminars and participated in the core curriculum, where he jointly taught with his colleagues a survey of modern international history.