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Lance Banning, Hallam Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, died of cancer on January 31, 2006. He was sixty-four. Lance earned his B.A. at the University of Missouri, Kansas (1968), and his Ph.D. at Washington University, St. Louis (1971), where he worked with John Murrin and John Pocock. He is survived by his wife Lana, his son Clinton, and his mother, Marie Gilbert Banning, and brother, Larry Banning, both of Kansas City.

Between 1971 and 1973 Lance was the executive director of the American Civilization Program at Brown University, which he ran with great aplomb, despite being just a recent Ph.D. He joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky in 1973, and taught there until his death. He held many fellowships, including ones from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for the History of Freedom. In 1997 he held the John Adams Chair in American History at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and in 2001 he was the Levrhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Lance’s first book, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978), was not his most famous work, but it may have been his most important. It clarified the nature of the party conflict in the 1790s as no previous book had. He made comprehensible why Jefferson could believe with some justification that the party struggles of the 1790s “were contests of principle between the advocates of republican and those of kingly government.” His book became the starting point for any subsequent work on the politics of the 1790s. It received the International Book Award of Phi Alpha Theta.

In 1995 Lance published Three Conversations from the Founding, a revision of the Merrill Jensen Lectures presented at the University of Wisconsin. During that same year his most well-known work, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Republic, also appeared. As painstaking a description of Madison’s political thinking as has ever been written, the book received the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History from the Organization of American History and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition, Lance wrote many articles and reviews and edited a number of books. He was also a co-editor of the University Press of Kansas Series in the History of American Political Thought, a distinguished series that turned out a number of important works. Lance admitted that he was not a fast writer, but he wanted to get everything down with as much care and clarity as he could muster. No one took the responsibility of being an honest historian more seriously than he did.

But Lance was more than a superb historian, he was an extraordinary human being as well. He was reserved and soft-spoken and, as with his writing, took great care in what he said, always thinking before he spoke. He had a gentle sense of humor and was unusually kind and generous to graduate students and fellow historians, even to those who differed with him politically and intellectually. For someone with so much talent, he was remarkably modest and unassuming. He possessed a rare integrity, and he commanded great respect from all who knew him. We shall miss him.

Brown University