August 03, 2020
Harold D. Langley

The Department of History is saddened to announce the death of our former colleague, Harold D. Langley (1925-2020).  A veteran of WWII, during which he received the Army Meritorious Service Medal and the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, Harry attended Catholic University on the GI Bill, graduating in 1950.  He went on to a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.  In his early career, Harry worked in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress and then as a Diplomatic Historian in the U.S. Department of State.  Harry joined the full-time faculty in Catholic University's Department of History from 1964 to 1971, and then became Associate Curator of Naval History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, continuing to teach for the Department as an adjunct until 2001.  He was an award-winning writer of military and diplomatic history: among his books were A History of Medicine in the Early US Navy, 1798-1843Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence; Documents on Germany 1944-1959; Documents on Disarmament, 1960; and St Stephen Martyr Roman Catholic Church and Community 1867-1967.  Among his many recognitions were the Samuel Eliot Morison Award from the USS Constitution Museum in 2001 and the Commodore Dudley W. Knox Naval History Lifetime Achievement Award from the Naval Historical Foundation.  In 2016, the Society for the History of Navy Medicine created a new award in his honor, the Harold D. Langley Book Prize for Excellence in the History of Maritime Medicine.