William Lincoln Bruce

Background

William Bruce Lincoln was born on September 6, 1938, in Suffield, Connecticut, the United States, to Charles A. and Ruth Lincoln. He had a brother named Charles.

Education

Lincoln received a bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary in I960. Later he received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1966.

Career

After serving for a year on the faculty of Memphis State University, Lincoln accepted a position at Northern Illinois University (NIU), where he taught until 1999. In 1967 Lincoln joined the faculty of Northern Illinois University, where he taught Russian history. From 1982 to 1986, he was Presidential Research Professor; from 1986 to 1990, University Research Professor; and from 1990 to 1999, Distinguished Research Professor and NIU Foundation Professor of Russian History. At the time of his death, he was Distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus.

While many Russian historians of his generation fixed their attention on the revolutionary movement and the Soviet "experiment," Lincoln charted an independent course; he chose to explore the complex relationship between instinctively cautious tsars and reform-minded bureaucrats. In this regard, two of his early studies deserve mention: Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (1978) and In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861 (1982). These works established his reputation as a leading authority on the last century of Romanov rule.

But, although his work was well received in learned circles, Lincoln had already concluded that Russian history was too essential to international understanding and too universal in appeal to be confined to the academy. Without compromising the rigorous standards of scholarship that he had set for himself, he began to write for an educated but nonprofessional audience. In prose that rivaled that of accomplished novelists, he brought Russia's turbulent past alive for many thousands of men and women. And not only those who were English-language readers; books of his also appeared in German, Polish, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish editions.

Blessed with a rare gift for synthesis, Lincoln did not scale down the historical landscapes he sketched for interested publishers. The first of his panoramas to appear, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (1981), was an 852-page tour de force that became a main selection of Macmillan's Library of World History Book Club and a Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It was matched in its conceptual boldness and stylistic grace by The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (1994) and Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia (1998).

Among Lincoln's other books, his narrative powers are perhaps most fully on display in In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (1983, a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club), Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution (1986), and Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (1989). In these stirring epics, he captured a time of bitter suffering and violent death, of Utopian dreams and vanished hopes. Along the way, he painted verbal portraits of entrepreneurs, aesthetes, reformers, revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, and the last Romanovs. But he also focused attention on nameless peasants and workers whose daily lives revealed much about the meaning of larger events. Such events, he showed, exhibited historical continuities - the burdens of an autocratic tradition. That tradition is likely to be evident again in the book he completed while fighting a quiet and courageous battle against cancer.

Achievements

• Lincoln received many research grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. He published more than 50 articles and reviews, and some of his books written for general readers sold more than 100,000 copies.
  
  During his 31-year career at the university, he also became known among graduate students for taking promising academics under his wing and nurturing them throughout their careers.
  
  After Lincoln's death, Northern Illinois University established the W. Bruce Lincoln Endowed Lecture Series to "engage key issues and are often interdisciplinary, in the spirit of Professor Lincoln’s research, writing and teaching."

Works

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  • Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life In Russia

    (A prominent historian explores the unique culture of Russ...)

    1998
  • The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians

    (An account of the history of Siberia describes the action...)

    1994
  • Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918

    (Based on rare documents and eyewitness information, this ...)

    1986
  • Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War

    (Discusses the brutal Russian Civil War, which, after Worl...)

    1989
  • The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias

    (For three centuries - beginning with the accession of Mik...)

    1981
  • In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War

    (In the quarter-century before World War I, change came to...)

    1983
  • Sunlight at Midnight

    (For Russians, St.Petersburg has embodied power, heroism, ...)

    2001
  • Nikolai Miliutin, an enlightened Russian bureaucrat 1977
  • Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias 1978
  • Petr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shanskii: The Life of a Russian Geographer 1980
  • In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861 1982

• movie

  • The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia

    (The Great Reforms of the 1860s marked the broadest attemp...)

    1993

Membership

Lincoln served as a member of the board of directors for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

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  American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies

Connections

In 1984 Lincoln married Mary Eagle Lincoln, and together they raised two daughters, Virginia Wallace and Mary Margaret Matzek.

Father:

Charles A. Lincoln

Mother:

Ruth Lincoln

Spouse:

Mary Eagle Lincoln

Daughter:

Virginia Wallace

Daughter:

Mary Margaret Matzek

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001