Peter Jack Gay

Peter Gay, a groundbreaking scholar of the social history of ideas, died on May 5, 2015. After graduating from the University of Denver in 1946, Peter entered Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree in history in 1947 and a doctorate in 1951. Peter grew up in a Jewish family in Nazi Germany. In 1938 he was forced out of his school, and the next year, aided by relatives in the United States, the family set sail 31 for Havana on the last ship to be admitted to Cuba. The family gained entry to the United States in 1941 and settled in Denver. As a refugee, Peter devoted his career to exploring the social history of ideas, and is known as one of the major American historians of European thought. He taught political science at Columbia from 1947 to 1955, and later joined the history faculty at Yale, where he taught until retiring in 1993. In 1999 he became the founding director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, which he led until 2003. A prolific scholar of truly international reputation, he received the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.