8/27/2021
Stephen B. Oates, Civil War Historian, Dies at 85
Historians in the Newstags: obituaries, Civil War history
Stephen B. Oates, a Civil War historian and the biographer of several prominent Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and William Faulkner, died on Aug. 20 at his home in Amherst, Mass. He was 85.
His son, Greg, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
In his best-known works, Dr. Oates explored the lives of four prominent figures — John Brown, Nat Turner, Lincoln and Dr. King — in what he called his “Civil War quartet.”
These men, he wrote in “Biography as High Adventure,” an essay published in 1986, “humanize the monstrous moral paradox of slavery and racial oppression in a land based on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.”
He added: “All four were driven, visionary men, all were caught up in the issues of slavery and race, and all devised their own solutions to those inflammable problems. And all perished, too, in the conflicts and hostilities that surrounded the quest for equality in their country.”
It was a sign of Dr. Oates’s status in his field that Ken Burns, the filmmaker, included him in his epic 1990 PBS documentary “The Civil War.”
“Stephen was an extremely valuable adviser to our Civil War series and an informed and passionate participant,” Mr. Burns said by email. “He knew the bottom-up story as well as the top-down one, but more importantly, he knew and appreciated the huge stakes for the United States and indeed the world in a Union victory.”
Dr. Oates taught history and biography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1968 to 1997, and his two-volume survey of American history educated a generation of college students.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- What Happens When SCOTUS is This Unpopular?
- Eve Babitz's Archive Reveals the Person Behind the Persona
- Making a Uranium Ghost Town
- Choosing History—A Rejoinder to William Baude on The Use of History at SCOTUS
- Alexandria, VA Freedom House Museum Reopens, Making Key Site of Slave Trade a Center for Black History
- Primary Source: Winning World War 1 By Fighting Waste at the Grocery Counter
- The Presidential Records Act Explains How the FBI Knew What to Search For at Mar-a-Lago
- Theocracy Now! The Forgotten Influence of L. Brent Bozell on the Right
- Janice Longone, Chronicler of American Food Traditions
- Revisiting Lady Rochford and Her Alleged Betrayal of Anne Boleyn