William Williams; Radical Historian

William Appleman Williams, a historian who sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy and who was particularly vocal during the Vietnam War, has died of cancer at age 68.

Williams, who claimed that the United States has acted as an imperialist power throughout its existence, died Monday at a hospital here. He lived in the nearby coastal community of Waldport.

A self-described radical, Williams was best known for a series of books written in the late 1950s and ‘60s that challenged prevailing views of American history. He charged that the United States was seeking to impose its economic and ideological will on an unwilling world, a world in which all peoples should have the right of self-determination.

He argued that the nation’s refusal to acknowledge its imperialist past led to a skewed national vision that made it difficult to set a course for the future.

But critics accused him of employing a double standard, of explaining Soviet actions by citing national security while measuring Western actions against a utopian ideal.

His books, which gave him a reputation as a revisionist historian, created widespread controversy in academic circles and influenced a generation of historians.

His views had entered the mainstream of American thought by the late 1970s and, in 1980, he was elected president of the Organization of American Historians.

In his book, “America Confronts a Revolution World: 1776-1976,” Williams wrote that “the act of imposing one people’s morality upon another people is an imperial denial of self-determination. Once begun, there is no end of empire except war and more war.”

“I think of him as the clearest of the revisionist historians and the inspirer of a school of younger historians who put the Cold War into a perspective that they didn’t have before,” said Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation, the liberal magazine for which Williams frequently wrote.

Williams, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who was wounded in the Pacific during World War II, was a professor at the University of Wisconsin from 1960 to 1968, and at Oregon State University from 1968 to 1986. He also taught at the University of Melbourne in Australia as a Fulbright scholar in 1977.