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PETER N. CARROLL 1943–2024  
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Sebastiaan Faber
September 18, 2024
ALBA - The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives
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_ 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. He was one of the key individuals involved in
founding the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. _

Peter N. Carroll,

 

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
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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.
 

_[To this moving tribute, we would like to add this note: Peter was
the creator of the Poetry feature of xxxxxx, and has been our poetry
editor since its inception. We have been enriched by his comradeship,
creativity and energy. Our condolences to the family and to all who
have known and will miss this restless spirit. -- moderator]_
 

_Photos thanks to his partner Jeannette Ferrary, to whom we extend our
deepest sympathy _

Peter N. Carroll Anti-Fascist Education Fund

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, with support from The Puffin
Foundation, announces the creation of the PETER N. CARROLL
ANTI-FASCIST EDUCATION FUND
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The goal of this fund is to expand our efforts to contextualize and
disseminate the anti-fascist history of the United States through the
experience of the Lincoln Brigade. The often suppressed and overlooked
history of these so-called “pre-mature anti-fascists “is critical
for an understanding of our history and present. Making sure primary
and secondary source curations of our material are available to all
researchers, academics, activists, teachers, and students who need it,
will be the direct mission of this fund. WE CAN THINK OF NO ONE
BETTER TO HONOR THAN PETER N. CARROLL, WHO HAD DONE SO MUCH THROUGHOUT
HIS LIFE AND CAREER TO FIGHT FASCISM THROUGH EDUCATION AND AWARENESS
RAISING.

* Peter N. Carroll
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* ALBA
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* Abraham Lincoln Brigade
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* Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives
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* Poetry
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* Spanish Civil War
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* International Brigades
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* historians
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