Hans-Ulrich Wehler (September 11, 1931 – July 5, 2014) was a German left-liberal historian known for his role in promoting social history through the "Bielefeld School", and for his critical studies of 19th-century Germany. Life Wehler was born in Freudenberg, Westphalia. He studied history and sociology in Cologne, Bonn and, on a Fulbright scholarship, at Ohio University in the United States; working for six months as a welder and a truck driver in Los Angeles. He took his PhD in 1960 under Theodor Schieder at the University of Cologne. His dissertation examined social democracy and the nation state and the question of nationality in Germany between 1840 and 1914. His postdoctoral thesis on Bismarck and imperialism, opened the way for an academic career. His habilitation project on "American imperialism between 1865 and 1900", supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, permitted him to do research in American libraries in 1962–1953 and resulted in two books. In all he spent six years in the US and was strongly influenced by its academic structures and by research in comparative modernization. Wehler taught at the University of Cologne (1968–1970), at the Free University of Berlin (1970–1971) and at Bielefeld University (1971–1996). Wehler and his colleagues Jürgen Kocka and Reinhart Koselleck founded the Bielefeld School of historical analysis. Instead of emphasizing the political aspects of history, which is the conventional approach, its proponents concentrate on sociocultural developments. History as "historical social science", as Wehler described it, has been explored mainly in the context of studies of German society in the 19th and the 20th centuries. He served as editor of the new journal from 1975. He married Renate Pfitsch in 1958 and had three children with her. In 2003, Wehler won the NRW State Prize. Bielefeld School Wehler is a leader of the so-called Bielefeld School, a group of historians who use the methods of the social sciences to analyze history. Social history developed within West German historiography in the 1950s the 1960s as a successor to the national history, which was discredited by National Socialism. The German brand of "history of society" (Gesellschaftsgeschichte) has been known from its beginning in the 1960s for its application of sociological and political modernization theories to German history. Modernization theory was presented by Wehler and the Bielefeld School as the way to transform "traditional" German history, that is, national political history, centred on a few "great