Contributor and Scholar Merrill Peterson Has Died

VQR contributor, Jeffersonian scholar, and UVA history professor Merrill Peterson has died. His long, full life included a Guggenheim fellowship, service in WWII, and a brief stint in the Peace Corps at the age of 76, with professional credentials including writing or editing 37 books, chairing the UVA history department, and serving as dean of the faculty for the UVA College of Arts & Science. Peterson contributed to VQR several times over the course of a quarter century, writing about Jefferson’s views on the rights of each generation of Americans on the occasion of the bicentennial, Jefferson scholar Dumas Malone in 1982, his time in the Peace Corps in 1998, and a review of The World Reacts to the Holocaust in 1999.

He was 88 years old.