Timeline for William Appleman Williams
| 1921 | William Appleman Williams is born in Atlantic, Iowa on June 12, the only child of Mildrede Williams and William Carlton "Billy" Williams, a pilot in the United States Air Force. |
| 1929 | In March, William Carlton Williams is killed in an airplane crash suffered during military war games exercises. William Appleman Williams is raised by his mother and maternal grandparents. |
| 1935 | Williams enters Atlantic High School, where he excels primarily as an athlete. |
| 1939 | Funded by a basketball scholarship, Williams is admitted into the Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. It is here that he becomes more passionate about his academic studies. |
| 1941 | Williams accepts an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, extended by a
Republican congressman from Iowa, Representative Ben F. Jensen. Williams's grades at Annapolis, average at first, improve with time. While at the Academy, Williams also writes for and helps to edit the institution's Trident Magazine. His reading comes to include Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and the English socialist G. D. H. Cole. |
| 1944 | Williams graduates from the Naval Academy with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical
and Thermodynamic Engineering. (His entire class is graduated one year early for purposes
of its inclusion in World War II.) Williams is immediately commissioned as a line officer in the United States Navy and is stationed on a Landing Ship Medium in the Pacific theatre. |
| 1945 | Days before the end of World War II, Williams sustains a severe back injury while
sailing through heavy seas. He spends much of the next thirteen months recovering
in hospital. Following the conclusion of the war, Williams is stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas. While there, he involves himself in local civil rights activities and joins the N.A.A.C.P. In December, Williams marries his high school sweetheart, Jeannie Preston. |
| 1947 | In September, Williams retires from military service in favor of pursuing his growing
passion for history. He is accepted into the graduate school at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, an institution that he seeks out in part because it is close to
his mother's new residence in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. While a graduate student, Williams is trained by a talented faculty deeply interested in the ideas of Charles Beard and other economic determinists. |
| 1948 | Williams receives his Master of Arts in History. His master's dissertation is titled
"McCormick Reports on Russia: A Study of News and Opinion on Russia in the Chicago Tribune from 1917-1921." |
| 1950 | Williams receives his Ph. D. in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
His doctoral thesis is titled "Raymond Robins and Russian-American Relations, 1917-1938." That summer he spends ten weeks in England attending a University of Leeds seminar on the economics of the Labour government, taught by the economist A. J. Brown. Upon his return, Williams assumes his first academic appointment, a one-year position as Instructor at Washington and Jefferson College. |
| 1951 | In the summer, Williams works as Visiting Lecturer at Bard College. That autumn he begins a one-year term as Instructor at Ohio State University. |
| 1952 | Williams publishes an influential essay titled "A Second Look at Mr. X" in the journal
Monthly Review. The essay is a forerunner of the revisionist historiography for which Williams
will become known. He also publishes his first book, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947, an outgrowth of his Ph. D. dissertation. One central theme of the book is Williams's idea that the roots of the Cold War could, in part, be traced to conflicting economic interests in east Asia between czarist Russia and the U.S. railroad industry. Williams accepts his first long-term academic position as Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. While at Oregon, Williams will publish a number of articles in smaller, left-leaning journals, including several essays in the Nation. He finds that his work is often rejected when submitted to the mainstream journals preferred by most historians. |
| 1955 | Jeannie Williams and William Appleman Williams divorce. Shortly thereafter, William Appleman Williams marries Corrine Croft Hammer, a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Oregon. |
| 1956 | Williams edits a two-volume collection of documents on diplomatic history published under the title The Shaping of American Diplomacy, 1750-1955. |
| 1957 | Williams leaves the University of Oregon for a professorship at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He will remain in Madison until 1968, a period during which his fame and influence grow to their highest levels. |
| 1959 | Williams publishes The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, his most popular book. Tragedy will run through three editions in the next two decades, expanding by over 100 pages in the process. In it, Williams expounds upon his view of a U.S. foreign policy oriented primarily toward the twin goals of gaining entry into previously-closed foreign markets and maintaining a hegemonic status quo in markets already accessed. Williams suggests that this approach assumed tragic dimensions in part because of the grievous socio-economic consequences that arose out of policies that the U.S. government intended to be democratic and socially-uplifting in nature. Though largely overlooked in its first printing, Tragedy becomes an important book to a growing segment of scholars seeking to understand the roots of the turbulent 1960s. A 1972 survey of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations reveals Tragedy to be the greatest influence upon the teaching of 38 out of 182 respondents, the largest single group by far. |
| 1960 | The unpublished manuscript of Williams's next book, The Contours of American History, is subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Williams will eventually make a short appearance before the committee and be excused. |
| 1961 | The Contours of American History is published. Though less-influential than Tragedy, Contours is considered by many contemporaries to be Williams's most original work. The book widens the scope of Williams's economic interpretation of American foreign policy to include the entirety of U.S. history. In Williams's view, mercantilism was the economic basis of what he considered to be the last genuine American community. With the rise of industrialism and, later, laissez-faire capitalism, the spirit of community in the U.S. had dissipated, leading to the rise of a host of domestic traumas. Through this prism, Williams defines, for example, the American Civil War as largely an effort to save a fledgling empire at any price. Echoing the claims issued in Tragedy, Williams sees twentieth-century foreign policy as primarily oriented toward protecting the interests of corporate elites. |
| 1962 | Williams publishes a short book titled The United States, Cuba and Castro: An Essay on the Dynamics of Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire, which argues that the rise to power of the Castro regime came about as a direct result of a century of U.S. expansionist policy in the region. |
| 1964 | Williams publishes a monograph titled The Great Evasion: An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx and on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic Into the Dialogue about America's Future. The book's main focus is Williams's growing belief in a renewed focus on the spirit of community as the single-most important source for an increase in the quality of life of most Americans. Williams also uses the essay to criticize the women's liberation movement, an indication of his increasingly-dour perspective on the political activism of many New Left groups for which he himself had served as an ideological forefather. |
| 1968 | Williams shocks the academic community by leaving the influential History program at Wisconsin-Madison for a position as Professor at Oregon State University. He does so in part to escape the hectic press of work at Wisconsin, but also because of his love of the sea. He establishes a permanent residence in Newport, Oregon, a coastal community fifty-three miles west of Corvallis. Corrine Williams does not make the move with him and their marriage soon ends in divorce. |
| 1969 | Williams publishes The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society. Heavily-footnoted, Roots is partly written in direct response to those critics who complain of Williams's tendency to lightly document his historical writing. Though widely-reviewed, the book also marks a waning in Williams's scholarly influence. Williams will publish prodigiously during his eighteen years at Oregon State, but none of his later work will make an impact anything like that of Tragedy or Contours. |
| 1972 | Williams publishes two books, From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign Relations and Some Presidents: Wilson to Nixon. The latter, a collection of essays previously-published in the New York Review of Books, sees Williams rethinking the conventional wisdom concerning the greatness of specific U.S. Presidents. Among them, Williams declares his affinity for Herbert Hoover, whom he regards to have been a misunderstood dreamer "of a cooperative American community." |
| 1973 | Williams delivers a speech, titled "Confessions of an Intransigent Revisionist," at
an American Historical Association meeting devoted to his work. Williams uses the
lecture to rebut the arguments of many of his long-time critics and to reinforce his
feelings on the validity of the revisionist approach to writing history. History as a Way of Learning, a collection of earlier essays, is published. Late in the year, Williams marries Wendy Tomlin, a British student whom he meets at OSU. The new family relocates from Newport to Waldport, Oregon, a smaller coastal town seventeen miles to the south. |
| 1976 | In commemoration of the U.S. bicentennial, Williams publishes America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1776-1976, which is met with tepid reviews. |
| 1978 | The Organization of American Historians honors Williams with a conference session
dedicated to his scholarship. Williams publishes Americans in a Changing World: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century. As with America Confronts, the book makes little impact. |
| 1980 | Williams is elected to a one-year term as President of the Organization of American
Historians. He uses the position to, among other activities, advocate for increased
federal funding of state historical societies, stimulate employment for history Ph.
D.'s and generate a capital fund for the organization. Williams publishes his last book Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America's Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative. The book marks the first and only time that Williams expounds upon the possible impact that social and cultural trends may have had in propelling U.S. expansionism. Throughout the decade, Williams will pen regular newspaper columns, first for the Salem Statesman-Journal and later for the Portland Oregonian. He uses the columns to express his feelings about the uniqueness of the American west and to detail his increasingly-radical views on the need for community in individual life. Williams eventually goes so far as to call for the division of the United States into a collection of smaller autonomous units, loosely joined under a weak Articles of Confederation steeped in "decentralized socialism." |
| 1981 | Williams publishes an article in The American Neptune titled "Notes on the Death of a Ship and the End of a World: The Grounding of the British Bark Glenesslin at Mount Neahkahnie on 1 October 1913." Along with his newspaper column, Williams's attentions increasingly turn to maritime topics over the final decade of his life. |
| 1986 | In June, Williams retires from Oregon State University under the title Professor Emeritus of History. |
| 1990 | On March 5th, Williams dies of cancer. He is cremated and his ashes are scattered at sea. |
Return to William Appleman Williams Papers Home