Craig, Gordon A. 1913–2005

(Gordon Alexander Craig)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 26, 1913, in Glasgow, Scotland; died of heart failure, October 30, 2005, in Portola Valley, CA. Historian, educator, and author. Craig, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, was widely considered a leading authority on the modern history of Germany. Although born in Scotland, he spent much of his life in the United States, having immigrated there via Canada in 1925. Here he attended Princeton University, where he received his B.A. in 1936, M.A. in 1939, and Ph.D. in 1941. He also attended Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar in 1938. Craig first became fascinated with Germany while he was in college. He had traveled there before the beginning of the war and was both amazed by the rich history and disgusted by the Nazi's wholesale attack on its own culture. During the war, Craig enlisted in the U.S. Marines, becoming an officer and also serving as a political analyst for the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he returned to Princeton, where he taught history until 1961. That year, he moved to the West Coast to join the Stanford faculty as a professor of history. Here he was named J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1969 and chaired the history department from 1972 to 1975 and from 1978 to 1979, when he retired as professor emeritus. Colleagues of Craig often credited his academic work with boosting Stanford's reputation as a nationally respected institution. A former president of the American Historical Association, Craig was a prolific author best known for his Germany, 1866–1945 (1978) and for the American Book Awardnominated The Germans (1982). Among his other publications are The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (1955), The Triumph of Liberalism: Zurich in the Golden Age, 1830–1869 (1988), and Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich (1999).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Independent (London, England), December 23, 2005, p. 45.

Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2005, p. B11.

New York Times, November 9, 2005, p. C17.

Times (London, England), November 16, 2005, p. 65.

Washington Post, November 9, 2005, p. B6.