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Merrill Peterson

A University of Virginia history professor, former chairman of the history department, and noted Jeffersonian scholar, Peterson wrote or edited 37 books in his lifetime. He fought in WWII, won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1962, and joined the Peace Corps at the age of 76.

Author

Responding to the Holocaust

By Merrill Peterson

Winter 1999

The World Reacts to the Holocaust, edited by David S. Wyman. Johns Hopkins, 1996, $65.00. The world, at least the Western world, responded to the Holocaust before it had a name. Whatever the date given to its origin, the annihilation of the Europe [...]

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Mr. Jefferson’s “Sovereignty of the Living Generation”

By Merrill Peterson

Summer 1976 | Essays

The Bicentennial of the American Revolution ought to be a time for restoring the dialogue between the spirit of the past and the spirit of the future in our national life. We commemorate our origins because our origins are intertwined with our destiny; memory is the reciprocal of hope, and conservation and change are essential to each other. "There is nothing real without both . . . ," as Alfred North Whitehead once said. "Mere conservation without change cannot conserve . . . , mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing."

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Dumas Malone: the Completion of A Monument

By Merrill Peterson

Winter 1982

A distinguished biographer of our time, Sir Harold Nicholson, once remarked of his art, "Biography is always a collaboration between the author and his subject; always there must be the reflection of one temperament in the mirror of another." Nothin [...]

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