Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80.
Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer, arranger, and high school music teacher. Peter, a talented trumpet player, alternated first chair in the high school band with Alan Rubin and watched Miles Davis jam at the Blue Note. Academically precocious, he joined Queens College as a 16-year-old. In college he took classes with the philosopher John J. McDermott who, he said later, “set him straight”; coincided with classmate Paul Simon; and worked as a sports editor for the student newspaper, The Phoenix. In the fall of 1961, the paper challenged the administration for banning left-wing speakers—Ben Davis and Malcolm X—and organized a strike of classes for free speech. Soon afterward, an editorial against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) led the college president to punish the editors with “disciplinary probation, with warnings of potential expulsion.” It was Peter’s first taste of McCarthyism.
When he was 20, Peter started his doctorate in US intellectual history at Northwestern University. By 1968, he had finished his dissertation—on Puritanism and the American Wilderness—and landed his first academic job, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, just as his thesis was being published. A few months later, he was hired at the University of Minnesota with full tenure. The lightning-quick transition into academic respectability—not to mention life-long job security—coincided with his political awakening. “The more I became concerned about the Vietnam War, the more my landscape broadened,” he later said in an interview.
Tenure did not give Peter peace of mind, to the contrary. “My future was so secure that I had no future at all,” he wrote in his 1990 memoir, Keeping Time. He decided to give up his academic career, but not before spending the last year of his appointment on a fellowship interviewing 25 former classmates from graduate school. As it turned out, his discontent was more widespread than he thought: about half of the people he talked to had switched careers.
For the next five decades, Peter made a living as a prolific freelance author, book reviewer, magazine editor, and teacher. He continued to be deeply interested in innovative takes on US history—including Black history, women’s history, and psychohistory—and helped modernize the field through books and textbooks such as The Free and the Unfree, co-authored with David W. Noble.
Peter’s career change in the early 1970s roughly coincided with the end of his first marriage, his first trip to Spain, a move to the San Francisco Bay Area, and the beginning of his relationship with Jeannette Ferrary, a writer and photographer who had also grown up in New York. Settled down with Jeannette in Belmont, California, Peter worked as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a radio host for Pacifica, and an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, where he taught a popular summer course on film and US history for many years.
In 1975, when the San Francisco City Magazine asked Peter to do a feature on the San Francisco Book Fair, he got to interview Alvah Bessie, a screenwriter—one of the Hollywood Ten—who had fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) as a volunteer in the International Brigades. Bessie introduced him to other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, including Milt Wolff, Abe Osheroff, and Jack Lucid. For the next couple of decades, Peter would interview dozens of veterans of the Spanish war as part of a massive oral history project that culminated twenty years later in The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, 1994)—an authoritative history of the close to three thousand Americans who traveled to Republican Spain as volunteer soldiers, drivers, or medical personnel.
An energetic activist and passionate educator, Peter became centrally involved in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), a non-profit founded in the late 1970s to safeguard the archival materials documenting the involvement of American volunteers in the Spanish struggle against fascism and to use them to educate the public about this often-overlooked chapter of American history. Peter chaired ALBA’s Board of Governors from 1994 until 2010 and between 2018 and 2020; served on its Executive Committee; co-edited its quarterly magazine, The Volunteer; co-curated several exhibits; and taught dozens of teacher workshops across the country.
For several years, Peter chaired the Advisory Committee of the Puffin Foundation; advised the Activist Gallery of the Museum of the City of New York; and served on the jury for the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. As ALBA chair, Peter was instrumental in the creation of the ALBA/Puffin Prize for Human Rights Activism, which has been awarded annually since 2010. In 2023, ALBA honored Peter’s decades-long service to the organization by creating the Peter N. Carroll Anti-Fascist Education Fund.
In his late sixties, following major heart surgery, Peter embarked on a successful career as a poet. “The source for poetry is the other half of my brain, the creative side—which is not easy to access,” he said in an interview. “When I pick up a pen, my first instinct is still to start writing prose. I often have to read poetry, others’ poetry, to get my head in the right place. But then something will start to cook. It’s an emotional thrust.”
Peter Carroll, a rigorous historian, fierce polemicist, sharp-eyed editor, and warm and generous friend, wrote and edited more than 20 books, including Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier (1969); The Free and the Unfree: A New History of the United States (1977); Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, & The Art of History (1990); The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (1994); We The People: A Brief American History (2002); and They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (2002), co-authored with Anthony L. Geist. He also authored more than ten volumes of poetry, including A Child Turns Back to Wave and This Land, These People, both of which have won the Prize Americana. In 2024 he published Sketches from Spain, a lyric homage to the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, in many cases using their own words, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Peter is survived by his partner Jeannette, his son Matthew and daughter-in-law Josie, his daughter Natasha and son-in-law Adam, and his six grandchildren: Eva, Ben, Jed, Noah, Jason, and Ryan.
—Sebastiaan Faber
Photo Credit – Jeannette Ferrary
