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Vol. 24:3 ISSN 0160-8460 December 1996
Eugene R. Sheridan
Gene Sheridan, senior associate editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, died on May 4, 1996, in an automobile accident near Princeton, N.J. He was 51. Gene leaves a wife, Sylvia, who was seriously injured in the accident, and a daughter, Maureen. Charles T. Cullen, who served as editor of the Jefferson Papers during part of Gene's tenure with that project, referred to him as "an editor's editor." That assessment was shared by the members of the Association for Documentary Editing, who in 1994 awarded him the Lyman H. Butterfield Award for his contribution to historical scholarship.
Gene received his B.A. in European history from Fordham University in 1966 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1968 and 1972. His field of study at Wisconsin was American colonial history, under the direction of David S. Lovejoy and Stanley N. Katz. His dissertation, which viewed the career of New York and New Jersey landed aristocrat Lewis Morris as a case study of the workings of the Anglo-American political system, won the first Alfred E. Driscoll Prize presented by the New Jersey Historical Commission, and was published by Syracuse University Press in 1981.
In 1972 and 1973, Gene served as an NHPRC editing fellow with The Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. He was assistant and associate editor of the Letters of Delegates to Congress project at the Library of Congress from 1973 to 1981, when he moved to the Jefferson Papers as associate editor. While working in Princeton, he also edited Congress at Princeton: Being the Letters of Charles Thomson to Hannah Thomson, June-October 1783, published in 1985, and a three-volume edition of the papers of Lewis Morris, which appeared in 1991 and 1993. Gene served as a faculty member of NHPRC's Camp Edit. His untimely death is a great loss to the historical profession and to his friends.
