John Hope Franklin, one of America's leading historians and a pioneer among African-American academics, has died. Among his many, many great books, I highly recommend his last, Mirror to America, a memoir focusing on his struggle against campus segregation, both as a student and a professor.
--Clay Risen
P.S.: It occured to me as I was walking home that Franklin was also among the last of the heroic generation of mid-century liberal historians, among them C. Vann Woodward, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Hofstadter, and Daniel Boorstin (who grew up near Franklin in Tulsa, Okla.).