The historian Robert H. Ferrell, who died Aug. 8 at the age of 97, taught generations of students at Indiana University how to join a subject and predicate to make a respectable sentence and how to combine two or more such sentences to form a presentable paragraph. Or at least he tried.
He taught by instruction and example alike. “Young man,” Ferrell addressed John Lewis Gaddis, the future historian of the Cold War, at their first meeting, having just read a draft of Mr. Gaddis’s dissertation, “you must always remember, when…