Arthur S. Link

He married Margaret Douglas Link (d. 1996) in 1945; they had four children, William A. Link (a historian), Dr. A. Stanley Link Jr. of Winston-Salem, N.C., and James Douglas Link of Flemington, N.J.; a daughter, Margaret Link Weil of Chapel Hill, N.C.; and four grandchildren.

As Link delved into the manuscripts, he changed his mind but usually did not try to rewrite his books. The one exception was Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (1979) (a revision of Wilson the Diplomatist). Link softened his criticism of Wilson's responses to the Mexican Revolution and German submarine warfare and also gave Wilson higher marks than before as a war leader and articulator of war aims in the Fourteen Points. Link had previously stated that Wilson would have taken the same unbending stand against ratification of the Versailles Treaty with Henry Cabot Lodge's reservations if he had enjoyed perfect health.

Link was distant from the administration and faculty but enjoyed working with undergraduates. His star pupil at Princeton University was Bill Bradley and at Northwestern University was George McGovern, who wrote labor history and was supported by Link during his 1972 Democratic candidate for president. Future Princeton, New Jersey mayor Phyllis Marchand, who worked for him as an indexer, noted that he rejected the idea of using computers and preferred index cards and a typewriter.

Princeton did not eagerly invite his return in 1958, but the Woodrow Wilson Foundation insisted on it as a condition for financing The Papers of Woodrow Wilson.

"Day after day, year after year since 1958, Mr. Link would rise at 5:30 in the morning and search for, read and assess hundreds of thousands of documents that would eventually fill the volumes that Princeton University Press published at $65 each. Princeton has sold almost 100,000 of them, an extraordinary number for this sort of work. At his desk, the same one that Wilson had used when he was president of Princeton, Professor Link wrote each of the long footnotes that explained the context of a particular letter or document, linking it to material that came before or would come later."

Link served as president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. In 1958–1958, he served as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. He published 30 books, including history textbooks, and was the recipient of numerous awards, including 10 honorary degrees and two Bancroft Prizes. He was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An active Presbyterian, he served as vice-president of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America. When not doing history, he enjoyed reading and rereading the novels of Anthony Trollope.

In Link's revision, he stressed Wilson's deteriorating cardiovascular condition and massive stroke. His medical deterioration made it hard for Wilson to compromise with Lodge and caused, in part, Wilson's earlier actions at the Versailles Peace Conference and his dealings with the US Senate over the treaty. Link incorporated his new ideas in elaborate notes in his edition of the Papers. The book is an attempt at a refutation of George F. Kennan's American Diplomacy (1951).

Link taught at Northwestern University (1949–1960) and Princeton University (1945–1949 and 1958–1992). He directed numerous PhD dissertations, including those of George McGovern (who worked on Colorado mine workers during 1910s), William Harbaugh (who worked on Theodore Roosevelt) and Gerald Grob (who studied mental health). His relations with his colleagues at Princeton were sometimes strained, as with Eric F. Goldman. At one point, Link was attacked by some scholars for his medical interpretation of Wilson, and Princeton University and the funding agencies seemed unsupportive, which caused the long relationship to end on a sour note in 1949.

Born in New Market, Virginia, 50 miles from Wilson's birthplace, in Staunton, Virginia, to a Lutheran minister of German descent, Link graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving a B.A. in 1941 and a Ph.D. in 1945. He got inspired to look into the career of Woodrow Wilson career by Fletcher Green, one of his professors.

Arthur Stanley Link (August 8, 1920 in New Market, Virginia – March 26, 1998 in Advance, North Carolina) was an American historian and educator, known as the leading authority on U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

The third was to argue that Progressivism collapsed after World War I because of internecine conflicts among reformers and uncertainties about how to pursue their agendas further. The Progressives ran out of ideas and so left the field to Warren G. Harding. Still, Link also argued that Progressivism was stronger in the 1920s than was generally acknowledged and that its underground currents formed the heart of the New Deal in the 1930s.

The second was to locate the heart of Progressivism in Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism platform of 1912, not in Wilson's New Freedom. Link's point was that Wilson was a conservative until 1913, when he suddenly accepted the core values of Roosevelt's proposals to use the federal government to reform the economy.

Although his early writings were critical of Wilson for demanding overly-harsh reparations from a defeated Germany after World War I, Link grew to love him. He became the leading specialist on Wilson, published a five-volume biography (to the start of the First World War) (out of eight originally planned), and edited all 69 volumes of Wilson's papers. Although he published numerous textbooks, Link concentrated his scholarship on the politics and diplomacy of the 1910s.