James R. Boylan (1927–2025)

Two communities of thought and practice were diminished by the death of historian-journalist James R. Boylan, who died peacefully on September 29, 2025, at age 97 in his home in Stonington, Connecticut.

Photo courtesy Boylan family

A native of Charles City, Iowa, Jim was the son of two high school teachers who kept a cow and chickens. He graduated from Cornell College, where he studied music and majored in English. Boylan served in the US Army in Japan before moving to Manhattan, where in 1951 he earned a graduate degree in journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism (CJS). He inaugurated his work life at This Week magazine before returning to Morningside Heights in 1957 to join Columbia’s journalism faculty.

Jim’s principal achievement at CJS was as the founding editor of a journal that was his idea: the Columbia Journalism Review, since 1961 the leading publication of its profession as well as an emblem of the professional school that publishes it. After eight years at the top of the journal’s masthead, he relinquished his post to pursue a doctorate in history a few buildings away while continuing to teach journalism. Studying under William E. Leuchtenburg’s direction, he added the identity of “historian” to that of “journalist” with the completion of his dissertation “Reconversion in Politics: The New Deal Coalition and the Election of the Eightieth Congress,” which was later published as The New Deal Coalition and the Election of 1946 (Garland, 1981). With two degrees in hand, Jim remained on the CJS faculty until 1979, part of that time again at the helm of the Review when the publication needed someone to direct it following the sudden resignation of an editor. He then joined the journalism faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught journalism and history until retiring in 1991. Boylan’s status among journalists was reflected in his service as a Pulitzer Prize juror.

Jim’s most important work of scholarship was without question Pulitzer’s School (Columbia Univ. Press, 2003), a superb institutional history of CJS, which Anthony Lewis called “candid” and “fascinating.” His other works included Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1998), a double biography concerning American socialism before World War I, which a review in the Journal of American History termed “a beautifully crafted gem”; studies about the press and school teaching; and with his wife, Elizabeth (Betsy) Wade, a local history of the Stonington Lighthouse. That work reflected his commitment to the coastal Nutmeg State town where he and Betsy maintained a second home and whose historical society he served as editor and president. He could also be found on the town’s tennis courts or in a kayak on its waters.

Behind the scenes, Boylan was a superb multifaceted editor whose influence in developing and editing others’ writings was strongly felt. After contributing in 1974 to a multiauthored historians’ report, edited by C. Vann Woodward, about responses of presidential administrations to charges of misconduct against them, a report solicited by and submitted to the Impeachment Inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee, he returned to the project 45 years later by volunteering himself to peer-review and copyedit the essays added for its 2019 revision, Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today (New Press, 2019). During its existence between 1996 and 2010, Jim worked with the History News Service, a distributor of historians’ op-eds to North American newspapers. He was expert at turning normal prose into AP-styled newspaper-ready text. He did not, however, achieve that goal without protesting in Boylan-style slyness about some of the op-eds he polished and occasionally slipping last-minute changes into them with an editor’s insouciant assumption of the final word.

All who knew Jim Boylan encountered a modestly spoken man of wide experience and strong core—someone from the country’s geographical center who took happily to his adoptive city’s brisk ways. His adaptation was surely helped along by his long marriage, begun in 1952, to Betsy, a formidable longtime New York Times editor and columnist who is remembered for her successful sex discrimination lawsuit against her employer. Predeceased by Betsy, Jim is survived by their sons Richard and Benjamin, their wives, six grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and a sister.