About the Author
Title Page || 1: The Roman Empire at its Height
Lynn Harry Nelson, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History, University of Kansas,
is a man who enjoys life and seeks new undertakings. Born in 1931, he spent
his childhood in Chicago and on a farm fourteen
miles north of Loon Lake in northern Saskatchewan. Upon high
school graduation in 1948, he went to the University of Chicago in 1950. He was drafted into the US Army for the Korean War. After military service
he joined his parents in west Texas and became a surveyor, passing the Registered Professional Engineer and Licensed State Land Surveyor
examinations. After a few years, he attended the University of
Texas at Austin, earning another Bachelors degree
in 1958 and the Ph.D. in history in 1963. He joined the faculty of the
University of
Kansas in Lawrence KS and retired in May, 1998..
He wrote The Normans in South Wales,
1071-1171 (1966); translated Pedro IV, King of Aragon, The
Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña : a Fourteenth-Century Official History of the
Crown of Aragon (1991) and Herman, of
Tournai, The Restoration of the Monastery of Saint
Martin of Tournai (1996); and contributed to The
Western Frontiers of Imperial Rome ( 1994); Classics of Eastern Thought;
The
Human Perspective: Readings in World
Civilization, Volume II: The Modern World
Through the Twentieth Century ( 1997)
A Global Perspectives: Source Readings from World Civilizations (1989); and Liutprand of
Cremona, Mission to Constantinople 968 A.D.(1972).
After
reading Don Mabry's Electronic Mail and Historians, 1991 in Perspectives of the American Historical
Association, he became fascinated with the possibilities of computer
telecommunications for the doing of history. He followed Mabry's lead in
establishing a public File Transfer Protocol site and the two sought other
historians to do the same. Nelson understood that the sites needed to be
interconnected and easy to use to have the most success. So he established a
common menu system at Kansas. His article
"Before the Web:
The Early Development of History Online," for an Italian Journal
which comments on these developments can be found in the Historical
Text Archive . He established Carrie: A Full-Text Online Library
at the University of Kansas.
Nelson is a witty, erudite man who knows how to tell a story. His short stories of
growing up in Chicago are masterpieces.
304
