Historian Page Smith Dies At 77 His People’s Histories Won Praise And Awards

Page Smith, an iconoclastic historian and prolific author of books on subjects from the lives of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to famous women and the importance of chickens, died Monday. He was 77.

Smith’s death was preceded by one day by that of his wife, Eloise Pickard Smith, 74, who served as director of the California Arts Council in the late 1970s.

Smith died of leukemia and his wife of cancer of the kidney, their daughter said.

Smith’s books were both praised by scholars and featured by the Book-of-the-Month Club. He also managed to avoid antagonizing fellow historians when he good-naturedly attacked them.

His unusual ability as a writer was first recognized in 1962 with the publication of his two-volume biography of John Adams, who had long been neglected by scholars because he fell under the shadow of George Washington. Smith’s study of Adams earned him the prestigious Bancroft Prize for historical writing.

In 1976, Smith’s mentor at Harvard University, Samuel Eliot Morison, described Smith’s book “A New Age Now Begins, a People’s History of the American Revolution” as “a great and magnificent work.”

Both works became main selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, as did another work in his wide-ranging series of people’s histories, “The Shaping of America” (1980).

His most controversial work was “The Historian and History” (1964), a witty indictment of American historians. He said most are absurdly overspecialized, slavishly addicted to textbooks in their teaching and foolishly pretending to objectivity.