Herman Belz (1937–2024)

Herman Julius Belz, emeritus professor of history at the University of Maryland, passed away in Rockville, Maryland, at the age of 86.

Photo courtesy Belz family

Belz grew up in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, and in 1959 earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where he was a star baseball and basketball player. While serving as an officer in the navy, he earned a PhD from the University of Washington in 1966 under the supervision of renowned historian Arthur Bestor. He took a position at the University of Maryland, where he taught for over 40 years.

Belz’s early work focused on the Civil War and Reconstruction period. His dissertation won the AHA’s Beveridge Award and was published as Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy During the Civil War (Cornell Univ. Press, 1969). His work was part of the “revisionist” school of Reconstruction historiography that accompanied the Second Reconstruction of the civil rights era. He extended his scholarship in this field with A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedmen’s Rights, 1861 to 1866 (Greenwood Press, 1976) and Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (W. W. Norton, 1978). His essay collections included Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era (Fordham Univ. Press, 1998) and A Living Constitution or Fundamental Law? American Constitutionalism in Historical Perspective (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

In the 1970s, Belz became a prominent figure in the conservative intellectual movement. This can be seen most clearly in his revision of Alfred H. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison’s The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development—the standard textbook in American constitutional history—first published by Norton in 1948. In 1983, Belz incorporated into its sixth edition a generation’s new scholarship. He noted, “Written from the perspective of progressive historiography and the liberal nationalist reform tradition,” the previous editions had “reflected the acceptance of and confidence in federal centralization and activist, interventionist government that achieved political and intellectual ascendancy in the New Deal era.” The new edition reflected the revival of traditional constitutionalist principles from both ends of the political spectrum. Norton published a seventh edition in 1991.

Belz also worked on the history of affirmative action. His Equality Transformed: A Quarter-Century of Affirmative Action (Transaction, 1991) became an essential starting point for subsequent scholarship. He did not shrink from expressing what he believed was affirmative action’s incompatibility with traditional American constitutionalism, concluding that “the struggle to define American equality will determine whether the United States will remain a free society.”

Belz’s work spanned the fields of political and constitutional history, political theory, and philosophy more broadly. The American Political Science Association hosted a panel on his work in 2008. Several of the many students and colleagues whom he inspired published a Festschrift for him in 2013, Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War (Fordham Univ. Press), edited by Paul D. Moreno and Johnathan O’Neill.

Belz’s impact went beyond the academy. Belz promoted the study of American constitutionalism in secondary education as academic director of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation from 1996 to 2012. He returned to his alma mater Princeton in 2000 as a visiting scholar in the first year of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He served on the National Council for the Humanities and the advisory boards of the Supreme Court Historical Society and the National Civic Art Society. He received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Bar Association, and the Earhart Foundation, among others.

Herman Belz is survived by his second wife of 38 years, Valerie, children Aaron and Kristin, stepchildren David and Liz, and four grandchildren.