Gienapp's Life Honored At Memorial Service

Distinguished Civil War historian William E. Gienapp was remembered as a man devoted to his craft, his students and his family in a Saturday service at Memorial Church.

Gienapp, Harvard College professor and professor of history, died Wednesday after a battle with cancer. He was 59.

“[His] death comes as a shock, for he was a model of strength and commitment—both to scholarship, and commitment to his family,” said Stephen Maizlish, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Maizlish praised Gienapp as a scholar, recalling that when he first met him in 1965 at an undergraduate seminar at the University of California at Berkeley, Gienapp was “unabashedly forthright, and direct in all that he said, did and wrote.”

“In 1967, when he applied to Yale grad school, when asked why he wanted to come to Yale to study history, he wrote, ‘because it is fun,’” Maizlish remembered. “Gienapp’s enthusiasm for his work was contagious—his view on history was that it was as pleasurable as it was amusing.”

Maizlish credited Gienapp’s profound contribution to the “major reinterpretation of the politics of the pre-civil war years” to his prodigious research and his mastery of the quantitative method.

Colleagues and students also expressed high regard for Gienapp’s dedication to teaching.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby remembered Gienapp as one of the first colleagues that he met when he came to Harvard and credited Gienapp as key to reinvigorating history department curricula in the 1990s.

“He built the courses which are now legendary to students....He improved this great old institution,” Kirby said.

Michael Vorenberg, one the first students to take Gienapp’s dissertation class, said that when he called friends and former students to collect anecdotes of Gienapp’s life, he was flooded by responses.

“He was a paradox as a teacher: he was shy, but he connected far beyond the usual teacher-student relationship,” said Vorenberg, who is now assistant professor of history at Brown University.

And Vorenberg said that Gienapp was meticulous in his attention to students’ writing.

He recalled an instance when a student inadvertently contradicted Gienapp’s writings in her thesis. When she later apologized to Gienapp, he was purported to have said, “There are two types of professors—those that want you to think like them, and those who just want you to think. I am of the latter type.”

Many students expressed their amazement at the quality of Gienapp’s teaching.

Course evaluation of Gienapp’s classes—which were ranked among the best five at the College—were read, sharing sentiments that ranged from comical to poignant.

“Lectures are excellent, and I never felt sleepy in class again after the first lecture,” wrote one student.

“Tears came to my eyes,” wrote another.

To his teaching assistants, Gienapp was known as the “general to his loyal troops,” while Gienapp called his TF’s the “Mudville 9.”

Yet, despite his dedication to the subject of history, Gienapp’s philosophy was to never take it too seriously.

“The reality was that he had a sense of humor about the entire academic enterprise,” Vorenberg said. He said that many times, when students or fellow colleagues held academic discourse with Gienapp, he would have this “inscrutable” expression on his face, as if there was an inside joke about the whole conversation that only he understood.

Gienapp was also remembered as a dedicated family man.

Maizlish said that when Gienapp was doing research for his dissertation, he could not face leaving his wife, so he postponed his research.

“In my 33 years here, I have never heard such adjectives used to describe a person and certainly never a person from the history department,” said Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church Peter J. Gomes.

Gienapp is survived by his wife Erica, two sons William Gienapp ’01 and Jonathan E. Gienapp ’06, his mother Jane and two brothers.