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Richard Buel Jr.

Richard Van Wyck “Dick” Buel Jr. died in Essex on Nov. 22, 2023. He was a scholar of American history who spent his career at Wesleyan University. He was born on July 22, 1933, in Morristown, New Jersey, the second child and only son of Richard Van Wyck Buel and Frances Worthington Thompson Buel.

He attended Groton School, Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with the class of 1955, and Harvard University, where he earned a doctorate in history in 1962. For the next 40 years, he taught American history at Wesleyan University and published six books. His first books were Securing the Revolution and Dear Liberty. With his wife Joy Day Buel, he wrote The Way of Duty, which was a Book of the Month Club dividend. An episode of the book was turned into the film “Mary Silliman’s War,” for which he served as the principal historical advisor, released on national cable in 1994. Next, he wrote In Irons, the only macroeconomic history of the American Revolution. Afterwards, came America on the Brink, a History Book Club dividend. His final book was Joel Barlow, a biography of a revolutionary ideologue in Europe who contributed to the French Revolution, written with the support of a fellowship from the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation. He assembled two editions of The Historical Dictionary of the Early American Republic, the second edition in collaboration with Jeffers Lenox, and edited three other books for the Acorn Club: Connecticut Observed, Original Discontents, and The Peopling of New Connecticut.

At Wesleyan, he chaired the history department from 1977 to 1980 and for 22 years, he served as associate editor of History and Theory. He twice received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He retired in 2002, but maintained an office at Wesleyan for the next decade. In retirement, he taught an American Intellectual History course in Wesleyan’s Prison Education Program. He was president of the New England Historical Association and served on the Connecticut Humanities Council and on the Connecticut Historical Commission. After the state legislature reorganized the Historical Commission in 2003, he joined the newly constituted Connecticut Historical Preservation Council. For many years, he was also active as a member of the Connecticut Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, serving as its president for a term.

In his later years, he became involved with the capital campaign that financed the expansion of the Essex Library. Then led the effort to restore the library’s endowment after the 2008 recession. In addition to a four-year term on the library’s board, he was a member of two local music boards, Chestnut Hill Concerts and Musical Masterworks, and was president of the Essex Meadows Foundation. An avid dinghy racer, for many years he raced a Blue Jay at the Pettipaug Yacht Club, where he served as commodore in 1990-1991. In 2005, he joined the Essex Yacht Club, and for more than a decade raced in its fleet of Ideal 18s. He also served as a volunteer for Middlesex Hospice.

He married Joy Day on June 6, 1964. After Joy died in 1987, he married Marilyn Ellman in 1992, who predeceased him in 2014. He is survived by his daughter Margaret, her husband John Coppens and two granddaughters, Alexandra Joy Callahan and Riley Elizabeth Callahan; his stepdaughter Elizabeth Frankel, her husband Donald T. Rave III, and their son, Haskel Patrick Rave; and the cherished companion of his last years, Kay Knight Clarke.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Essex Meadows Scholarship Foundation at 30 Bokum Road, Essex, CT 06426.

His memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Jan. 15, 2024, at First Congregational Church of Old Lyme. All who would like to celebrate Dick’s life are welcome.