William H. McNeill, an author and longtime University of Chicago professor who was recognized by President Barack Obama for his sweeping, masterly writings on history that captured thousands of years of civilization — and the influences of disease, war, art, technology and trade — has died at 98.
Mr. McNeill, an emeritus history professor who retired to Connecticut, died July 8 in Torrington, Conn., according to the university.
“He was one of the most important American historians of the 20th century, a leading scholar of world history and also modern European history,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the liberal arts college at the university.
A teacher at U. of C. for 40 years, Mr. McNeill wrote more than 20 books. His works were popular as well as scholarly. A 1976 book, “Plagues and Peoples,” won rave reviews, and top scientists called it a landmark. In it, he wrote about how smallpox was key to allowing 16th century explorer Hernando Cortez and 600 Spanish soldiers to defeat the Aztec empire, “whose subjects numbered millions.”
One of Mr. McNeill’s most noted works, the 860-page “The Rise of the West,” won a 1964 National Book Award.
In 2010, Obama awarded him a National Humanities Medal.
Mr. McNeill won praise for his big-picture ability to recognize how subtle connections and events rippled over multiple civilizations and societies.
“History has to look at the whole world,” he said in an interview when he retired in 1987. “And that means you have to know how the rest of the world is, how it got to be the way it is.”
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, he graduated in 1938 from the University of Chicago, where he was an editor of the student paper, the Maroon. Later, he earned a master’s from the university, as well as a doctorate from Cornell University.
Boyer, who was a former student of Mr. McNeill, said his mentor built the history department into an internationally renowned research center during the time he chaired it in the 1960s.
“Bill was also one of the founders and chair of the ‘History of Western Civilization’ core course in the college in the later 1940s and thus contributed mightily to the history of general education at the university,” Boyer said.
During the 1960s, Mr. McNeill had a role in arranging for artist Henry Moore to cast the “Nuclear Energy” bronze, a campus sculpture commemorating the site of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, according to the university.
In 1996, he received The Netherlands’ Erasmus Prize — a prestigious cultural recognition with a $180,000 award. Past winners have included Charles Chaplin and Marc Chagall.
Mr. McNeill arrived in the Midwest at 10, when his father, John McNeill, a historian of Christianity, began teaching at the University of Chicago. His father had a lasting influence on his scholarship.
“I typed the manuscript of ‘The Rise of the West’ on a portable Underwood noiseless typewriter that my parents had given me as a 21st birthday present,” Mr. McNeill wrote in his memoir. “It was accompanied by a verse my father composed inviting me to ‘write a book of lasting worth.’ ”
Like his son, the elder McNeill discerned links among varied groups — in his case, religions, as one of the prime movers behind an effort to connect Canada’s Christian denominations, according to Deborah McNeill, one of William McNeill’s daughters.
The younger Mr. McNeill enlisted in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served five years, acting as a military attache in Cairo and Greece, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Darbashire, a government librarian, their daughter said. He worked with Lincoln MacVeagh, the U.S. ambassador to the Greek and Yugoslavian governments in exile, according to Humanities magazine. That led to his first book, “The Greek Dilemma: War and Aftermath,” published in 1947.
“What better experience could a historian have than to find himself observing revolution and counterrevolution close-up?” he later wrote.
In retirement in Colebrook, Conn., he added a book-crammed study to the home inherited from his wife’s family, who’d been in New England for generations. “That was the biggest room in the house,” said Deborah McNeill.
She said her father never wasted time. She remembers him “typing at his typewriter when we went camping. He would sit in his camp chair with a typewriter in his lap at the beach.”
In his later years, he watched more TV, enjoying seeing the New England Patriots play and also watching tennis, especially his favorite player, Roger Federer.
He is also survived by another daughter, Ruth; his sons, Andrew, and John, a Georgetown University historian with whom he co-wrote “The Human Web,” and 11 grandchildren. A memorial in Connecticut is being planned, his daughter said.
In an interview with Humanities magazine, Mr. McNeill talked about what he loved about his job as a professor.
“Teaching is the most wonderful way to learn things,” he said. “You have to get up before a class at 10 o’clock the next morning and have something to say.”
