Lloyd Eugene Ambrosius, the Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), died unexpectedly on May 7, 2024, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was 82 years old.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius
Lloyd was born on August 21, 1941, to Sterling and Grace (Baxter) Ambrosius. He grew up in Huntsville, Illinois, and attended school in nearby Augusta. He entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the fall of 1959 as a premedical major but later switched his major to history with a philosophy minor. Lloyd completed his BA with honors in liberal arts and sciences and high distinction in history in 1963. He married Margery Marzahn on August 24, 1963, while working on his MA in history at UIUC, which he completed in August 1964. Marge earned her BA and MA degrees in history while Lloyd began his doctoral studies under the direction of Norman Graebner. He earned his doctorate in 1967, with a dissertation titled “The United States and the Weimar Republic, 1918–1923: From the Armistice to the Ruhr Occupation.”
Lloyd taught in the UNL Department of History from 1967 until his retirement in 2015. At Nebraska, he taught the US history and diplomatic history surveys, as well as upper-division and graduate classes on US-German relations, international politics, European politics, and the US presidency. Eminently approachable, he celebrated the successes of colleagues and students alike. His graduate students relied on his keen grasp of institutional politics as they navigated the early years of their professional careers. He also taught abroad, with two Fulbright fellowships at the University of Cologne in 1972–73 and the University of Heidelberg in spring 1996, and as Mary Ball Washington Chair of American History at University College Dublin in 1977–78.
Lloyd’s influence at UNL reached beyond the history department. He was the founding coordinator and chief adviser for the university’s international affairs program and interim director of the university’s Institute for International Studies. Within the College of Arts and Sciences, he served as parliamentarian for nearly a decade. He also chaired the program committee for the university’s E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues, working tirelessly to bring national and international figures to Lincoln. Upon his retirement, Lloyd received the university’s Louise Pound-George Howard Distinguished Career Award. In 2022, alumni donations established the Lloyd Ambrosius Graduate Student Support Fund in his honor.
A prolific author, Lloyd wrote four books on Woodrow Wilson published over a 30-year span: Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987); Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Scholarly Resources, 1991); Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017). In these works, as well as in countless book chapters and journal articles, he offered his trenchant assessment of Wilson’s diplomacy and how Wilson’s liberal internationalism influenced any number of 20th- and 21st-century policymakers as they pursued ill-conceived and misguided policies in the name of democracy. In his later writings, Lloyd would assert that Wilson’s Protestant Christianity and racism shaped his world view and influenced both his domestic and foreign policies.
Lloyd made significant leadership contributions to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE). A member of SHAFR since its founding in 1967, he served on various committees, the editorial board of Diplomatic History, and council. At SHGAPE, he served on the editorial board of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and as a council member, vice president, and president. Even in retirement, he looked forward to attending the annual meetings of those organizations, as well as of the AHA and Organization of American Historians, to reconnect with friends and mentor younger scholars.
Lloyd Ambrosius was preceded in death by his wife, Margery Marzahn Ambrosius. He is survived by his sons and daughters-in-law Walter Ambrosius and Leslie Underwood, and Paul Ambrosius and Valerie Daugherty; his grandchildren Michael Ambrosius and Em Ambrosius; and his brother and sister-in-law John Ambrosius and Margaret Adams.
Kristin L. Ahlberg
Office of the Historian, US Department of State (retired)
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