William E. Gienapp
William Gienapp died of a prolonged illness at the age of 59, on October 29, 2003. His loss has been keenly felt by Harvard students, his colleagues, and the historical profession.
Gienapp was born in Denton, Texas on February 27, 1944. His father was a public school principal and teacher, and his mother taught as well. Most of his boyhood was spent in rural Iowa, about 30 miles outside of Des Moines, but in his early teens the family moved on to Southern California. He began his undergraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley as a physics major, but was seduced into the study of history by his first college course on the subject, given by Kenneth Stampp, Berkeley's distinguished historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. After Berkeley, Gienapp went on to do graduate work at Yale, but was dismayed to find that the eminent scholar with whom he hoped to write a dissertation had recently concluded that little new could be learned about the coming of the Civil War and was therefore steering all of his graduate students into work on the Reconstruction period. Even at his comparatively tender age, Gienapp was sure that the Civil War was the central event in American history, and he was determined to conduct research that might enrich our understanding of how and why it had come about. If it could not be done at Yale, he would return to Berkeley and work under Stampp's direction.