William Gienapp, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetWilliam Gienapp
Date of Birth: 27-Feb-1944
Place of Birth: Denton, Texas, United States
Date of Death: 01-Jan-0001
Profession: historian
Zodiac Sign: Pisces 
About William Gienapp
- William E.
- Gienapp (February 27, 1944 – October 29, 2003) was an American historian, noted for his writing on the period of the American Civil War.
- His widely-acclaimed and prize-winning The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (1987), which was based on a massive volume of original research and dramatically revised traditional understanding of the political party's origins, is still considered one of the most important books ever written on 19th-century American politics and the coming of the Civil War.
- Later he wrote Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography (2002), which was deemed by numerous leaders in the field to be the best brief biography of Lincoln ever written.
- He also co-authored one of the best-selling United States history textbooks of the last generation, Nation of Nations, and compiled one of the most widely-used documentary readers on the era of the Civil War, The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection (2001).
- Many years after his death, his wife, Erica Gienapp, completed one of his final projects: The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy: The Original Manuscript Edition (2014).
- It painstakingly restored one of the most important primary sources of Abraham Lincoln's administration to its complete, original form. During his long tenure at Harvard University, Gienapp acquired a reputation as a beloved teacher and devoted mentor of graduate students.
- In addition to teaching popular courses on the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and antebellum America, he also taught a course on the history of baseball in the United States that quickly became one of the most sought-after classes offered at Harvard.Gienapp held a B.A.
- and Ph.D.
- from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under Kenneth Stampp, and an M.A.
- from Yale University.
- After earning his doctorate in 1980, Gienapp began working at the University of Wyoming.
- He became a visiting associate professor at Harvard in 1988 before formally joining the faculty the following year.
- Gienapp died prematurely in the fall of 2003 at the age of 59 from complications surrounding a rare form of blood cancer.
- He was survived by his wife and two sons.
Read more at Wikipedia