Roy Franklin Nichols, longtime professor of history and dean of the graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, stands high among major interpreters of nineteenth-century American political history. His detailed investigations into the disintegration of the Democratic party during the 1850s won him his greatest acclaim. However, Nichols was also among the first to attempt an explanation of political events in their cultural contexts. As early as the 1930s, he borrowed heavily from psychology, sociology, and the natural and physical sciences to support traditional narrative political history with humanistic insights from the emerging field of social history.

Professor Nichols was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Franklin Coriell and Annie Cairns Nichols. He enjoyed a comfortable, even pampered, childhood as an only child; two older brothers had died before he was born. He reflected much later in life that he had inherited his love for learning and the...