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William S. McFeely | |
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| Born | William Shield McFeely September 25, 1930 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | December 11, 2019 (aged 89) Sleepy Hollow, New York, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Amherst College Yale University |
| Occupation | Historian |
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William McFeely, Pulitzer-Winning Historian, Dies at 89 - The New York Times
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William Shield McFeely (September 25, 1930 – December 11, 2019)[1] was an American historian known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as his contributions to a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, and for advancing the field of African-American history.[2] He retired as the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities emeritus at the University of Georgia in 1997, and was affiliated with Harvard University since 2006.
Life and career
McFeely was born in New York City, the son of William C. McFeely, an executive with Grand Union supermarkets, and Marguerite McFeely (née Shield), a homemaker.[2] He graduated from Ramsey High School, in New Jersey. After earning a B.A. at Amherst College in 1952, he worked for the First National City Bank of New York for eight years, before deciding to pursue graduate work in American studies at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1966.[2] At Yale, he studied with, among others, C. Vann Woodward, whose book The Strange Career of Jim Crow was a staple of the Civil Rights Movement. Like Woodward, he sought to employ history in the service of civil rights. His dissertation, later the 1968 book Yankee Stepfather, explored the ill-fated Freedmen's Bureau which was created to help ex-slaves after the Civil War.
McFeely taught at Yale until 1970,[2] during the tumultuous years of the American Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movements, and was instrumental in creating the African-American studies program there,[2] at a time when such programs were still controversial. One of the students in his class was Henry Louis Gates Jr., later the director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and Professor at Harvard.[3]
He taught for 16 years at Mount Holyoke College before joining the University of Georgia in 1986 as the Constance E. Smith Fellow. McFeely won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which portrayed the general and president in a harsh light. He concluded that Grant "did not rise above limited talents or inspire others to do so in ways that make his administration a credit to American politics."[4]
McFeely retired in 1997. He was a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during the 2006–2007 academic year, where he studied Henry Adams and his wife Clover Adams, and Clarence King and his wife Ada Copeland King.[5] He was a visiting scholar and associate member of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department and an associate of their Humanities Center.
McFeely died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis on December 11, 2019, at his home in Sleepy Hollow, New York, at the age of 89.[2]
Awards and honors
- 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Grant: A Biography[6]
- 1982 Francis Parkman Prize for Grant: A Biography
- Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1987)[7]
- The Lincoln Prize 1992 for Frederick Douglass (based upon the life of Frederick Douglass).
- 1992 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians.[8]
Select scholarship
- Yankee Stepfather: General O.O. Howard and the Freedmen (W. W. Norton, 1968)
- Grant: A Biography (W. W. Norton, 1981)
- Frederick Douglass (W. W. Norton, 1990)
- Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom (W. W. Norton, 1994)
- Proximity to Death (W. W. Norton, 2000)
- Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins (W. W. Norton, 2007)
See also
References
- Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich (May 2013). Main Achievements of American Presidents. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 104–. ISBN 978-3-643-90362-4. Retrieved July 8, 2015.
- Genzlinger, Neil (December 13, 2019). "William McFeely, Pulitzer-Winning Historian, Dies as 89". New York Times. Retrieved December 14, 2019. Print version December 14, 2019, p. B11.
- Genzlinger, Neil (2019-12-13). "William McFeely, Pulitzer-Winning Historian, Dies at 89". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-12-16.
- McFeely, William (1981). Grant: A Biography. W.W. Norton. p. 522.
- Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. "William S. McFeely". Retrieved on May 25, 2013.
- St. Petersburg Times. "Kansas City Times wins 2 Pulitzer Prizes for reporting". Associated Press/United Press International, April 13, 1982, pp. 1-A, 12-A. Retrieved on May 25, 2013.
- "William S. McFeely". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved December 14, 2019.
- Organization of American Historians. "Avery O. Craven Award Winners" Archived 2013-06-04 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved on May 25, 2013.
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In Memory
It is with deep sorrow that I report the death of Bill McFeely, one of the most distinguished members of our class and of our parent, Amherst College, since the days of its inception. Bill’s father was an alumnus of Amherst (1920), as were his son, Drake ’76, and grandson Matthew ’05.
After Amherst, Bill enjoyed success as a banker in New York City, but decided he needed a change of direction that would contribute to social progress in this country. He was accepted by Yale for its doctoral program under C. Vann Woodward, one of the primary academic leaders of the civil rights movement. Bill followed Woodward’s footsteps in a most distinguished way, promoting black studies with vigor and much success. Bill stayed on at Yale for four years after receiving his doctorate, during which time he taught Henry Louis Gates Jr., the great Harvard scholar.
After Yale, Bill became dean of Mount Holyoke College, where his combined academic and financial background was important during a difficult transition in the college’s management. He also became an outstanding professor in its history department. His seminal biography of Ulysses S. Grant won Bill a Pulitzer Prize as well as an honorary doctorate from Amherst.
After 16 years at Mount Holyoke, Bill left for the University of Georgia, where he taught for a little more than a decade. Retiring from active academic life, he became a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a scholar at Harvard’s African-American Studies Institute.
With Amherst now focusing so much on diversity and inclusion, it is a matter of great pride that our classmate was one of the earliest and most effective promoters of black studies.
Bill Smethurst ’52
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Thank you Jack. William McFeely most definitely deserves recognition. I plan on finishing my list before the end of Summer. William McFeely will be remembered soon.
William McFeely, Pulitzer-Winning Historian, Dies at 89
The author of acclaimed biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass, he also helped establish Yale’s black studies department.
William S. McFeely, a historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant but was also well known for advancing the field of black history, died on Wednesday in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. He was 89.
His son, W. Drake McFeely, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease.
Professor McFeely also wrote an acclaimed biography of Frederick Douglass as well as “Yankee Stepfather: General O.O. Howard and the Freedmen” (1968), a study of the Freedmen’s Bureau, set up by the government at the end of the Civil War to oversee the welfare of freed slaves, and the man who ran it.
These books and other writings established Professor McFeely as a leading interpreter of Reconstruction, the pivotal period after the Civil War.
“Via his books on Howard, Douglass and Grant,” the historian Eric Foner said by email, “McFeely played a major role in the re-evaluation of Reconstruction — seeing it not as an era of misgovernment and corruption as previous scholars too often did, but as a key moment, despite its flaws, in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in this country.”
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Whatever his subject, Professor McFeely wrote in a style that was unusually accessible for academia.
“His prizewinning books, and especially his magnificent biographies, have made the past vivid for scholars and general readers alike,” the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, a former president of Harvard University, said by email.
William Shield McFeely was born on Sept. 25, 1930, in New York. His father, William C. McFeely, was an executive with Grand Union supermarkets, and his mother, Marguerite (Shield) McFeely, was a homemaker who did volunteer work.
Professor McFeely graduated from Ramsey High School in New Jersey and earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1952. He seemed headed for a career in banking, but in 1960, after eight years at the First National City Bank of New York, he enrolled at Yale University to pursue a Ph.D. in American studies, which he received in 1966. His dissertation became “Yankee Stepfather,” published in 1968.
Professor McFeely taught at Yale until 1970, helping to establish the university’s Department of African American Studies and teaching a core course on African-American history. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, was among the black students in his class.
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“Professor McFeely’s riveting lectures brought to life in the most vivid way a world about which most of us had been unaware,” Professor Gates wrote in an email, “a world of black achievement, sacrifice, resistance and attainment, facts and stories that had been edited out of standard American history textbooks.”
“Inevitably,” he added, “during question period, someone would stand up and rudely ask how a white man like him could dare to teach a black history class. Invariably, he responded, unfazed, that the person was absolutely right, that a black person should be hired, and would be hired one day, soon. But in the meantime, we should study our lecture notes and do next week’s reading for the class! I think even the most militant among us respected him enormously for the courage of that response.”
In 1970 Professor McFeely became a history professor and dean of the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He wrote “Grant: A Biography” (1981) while there. Others had mythologized Grant, but Professor McFeely’s book did the opposite.
“There are historians who, when asked to contemplate Grant, insist that he must have had some secret greatness, hidden within him, that allowed him to accomplish what he did,” Professor McFeely wrote.
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“I am convinced that Ulysses Grant had no organic, artistic or intellectual specialness,” he continued. “He did have limited though by no means inconsequential talents to apply to whatever truly engaged his attention. The only problem was that until he was nearly 40, no job he liked had come his way — and so he became general and president because he could find nothing better to do.”
Professor McFeely took a similar approach in “Frederick Douglass,” published in 1991, five years after he moved to the University of Georgia.
“After all that has been written about Douglass,” Herbert Mitgang wrote in reviewing that book in The New York Times, “including some mythmaking by Douglass himself in three autobiographies, Mr. McFeely’s ‘Frederick Douglass’ has a freshness of fact and boldness of interpretation that is admirable.”
Ishmael Reed, in his review in The Los Angeles Times, found that the book captured not only the man but the era.
“This engaging and well-written work of literature suggests that the Age of Douglass was this nation’s greatest epoch,” Mr. Reed wrote. “People of humble origin transcended themselves. Former slaves rose to greatness and spoke with the eloquence of angels.”
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Professor McFeely’s interests extended to other areas as well. After he was called as an expert witness in a legal case in Georgia, he became interested in the death penalty in that state. Immersing himself in the subject, he produced, in 1999, the book “Proximity to Death,” in which he, a death penalty opponent, observed a series of capital punishment cases and the work of the lawyers defending the accused.
“This book is simply a story of a few people living in one corner of the country who carry a large responsibility,” he wrote. “The dry boards of a Georgia courthouse creak into life when one person — a lawyer — in defiance of a society that no longer cares, goes about the tough, unpopular work of trying to keep us from killing his client.”
His most recent book was another departure, a biography of an artist: “Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins” (2006).
Professor McFeely’s wife of 66 years, Mary Drake McFeely, died in 2018. They moved to the Hudson River town of Sleepy Hollow in 2013 after living for years in Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod. In addition to his son, he is survived by two daughters, Eliza and Jennifer McFeely; a sister, Jean Ann Kessler; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
During his Yale tenure, a contentious time on American campuses, Professor McFeely sometimes felt the strain of being a white professor teaching black history. In a 2011 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he recalled turning up to teach his black history class during the May Day turmoil of 1970, when the campus was the site of protests related to a Black Panthers trial.
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He wrote an outline of the day’s lesson on the blackboard, but when he turned around to face the students, he got a surprise.
“I found myself looking down at three camouflage-clad men carrying automatic weapons,” he wrote in the article. “The spokesman — a black radical in town for the rally — said emphatically, ‘I’m closing this class down.’”
“With more presence of mind than confidence,” he continued, “I said that I didn’t think the statistics on the board made what we were going to talk about that morning irrelevant to events on campus.” On the board he had just written figures on the number of black men lynched in the United States. The three intruders backed down, and the class continued.
WILLIAM MCFEELY
1930 - 2019
WILLIAM MCFEELY Obituary
To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.
Contact
Nickname
- Bill
Family
Amherst Relatives
- Marguerite S. McFeely W1920, P'52, G'76, GG'05 (d)
Personal
Professional
Amherst
Reunion Class
- 1952
Graduation Year
- 1952
Major(s)
- American Studies
Other Academic
Amherst
Post-Graduate
This profile appears with other deceased alums from the class of ’52 – Kenneth Brown and Ulric Haynes
William McFeely ‘52, historian and supporter of African-American Studies (1930- 2019)
Obituary and Tribute
William S. McFeely, a historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant but was also well known for advancing the field of black history, died on Wednesday [in December, 2019] in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. He was 89. Said historian Eric Foner, “McFeely played a major role in the re-evaluation of Reconstruction — seeing it not as an era of misgovernment and corruption as previous scholars too often did, but as a key moment, despite its flaws, in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in this country.” Professor McFeely taught at Yale [from 1966] until 1970, helping to establish the university’s Department of African American Studies and teaching a core course on African-American history. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, was among the black students in his class. “Professor McFeely’s riveting lectures brought to life in the most vivid way a world about which most of us had been unaware,” Professor Gates wrote in an email, “a world of black achievement, sacrifice, resistance and attainment, facts and stories that had been edited out of standard American history textbooks.” In 1970 Professor McFeely became a history professor and dean of the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He stayed 16 years then went to the University of Georgia. McFeely retired in 1997 and was a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a currently a visiting scholar and associate member of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, and an associate of their Humanities Center.
Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._McFeely
NYT obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/books/william-mcfeely-pulitzer-winning-historian-dies-at-89.html
*******************
From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2026 6:43 PM
To: Jack Hailey <jack@gacinstitute.org>
Subject: Re: Charlie Stillman profile
Jack,
This is great! He seems to have been a great guy. Please add this to his profile.
What do you have for for Bill McFeely?
Everett
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Robert Purvis (1810-1898), abolitionist, likely attended Amherst Academy
Charles Thomson, janitor from 1850s into the 1890s
Henry Martin Tupper, Class of 1859 – founded Shaw University
Frank Alvin Hoser, class of 1875, teacher/mentor of W.E.B. Du Bois
F. Dwight Newport, athletic trainer for 42 years
Robert Gilbert “Gil” Roberts, janitor of Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club, died in 2002 at age 106
Lillie Bell Jenkins (1925 – 2010)
Nancy Louise Holt Miller (1926-2015) and Carol Holt Miller (c.1954– 1984)
William McFeely ‘52
Richard Romer ‘52
Ken Howard ‘66
Charlie Stillman ‘67
Richard O’Daniel, Dean during 1973
David Wills 1942-2024 – documentary history project on African American Religion
Liz Agosto – dean from 2019 to 2023
