Joyce Appleby (1929–2016)

Joyce Appleby was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and attended public school in several cities, including Dallas and Kansas City. She graduated from Stanford University in 1950, and worked for Mademoiselle magazine in New York City. She returned to California to marry Andrew J.E. Bell, a professor of European history, with whom she had three children. She continued to write for magazines and newspapers while her children were young, and earned a Ph.D. in history from Claremont Graduate School. She began teaching at San Diego State University, and in 1978 published her first book, Ideology and Economic Thought in Seventeenth-Century England, which won the Berkshire Prize. In 1980, she was named to the Council of the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, acting as chair from 1983-1986. She was appointed Professor of History at UCLA in 1981, and taught there for 20 years before retiring in 2001. In 1990-91, she was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University and a fellow of Queen's College. She has served as President of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. A collection of her essays was published as Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (1992). She published Telling the Truth about History with Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob in 1994. She is the author of numerous other works, including Inheriting the Revolution: the First Generation of Americans (2000), and a biography of Thomas Jefferson (2003). She continues to co-direct the History News Service, which distributes op-eds written by historians to more than 300 newspapers weekly. She has also served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and the William and Mary Quarterly.