Richard died Dec. 21, 2020, in Santa Rosa, Calif. A lifelong Californian, he was born in Los Angeles Oct. 16, 1933, and grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula and in southern California.
After graduating from high school in 1951, he enlisted in the Air Force, serving as a tail gunner in the Korean War. In 1955 he entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in history and graduated in 1958. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Princeton in 1962. His book Revolutionary Hamburg: Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (1966) is considered a classic in the field. He taught at Stanford and at Mills College before leaving academia in 1969.
During the next four decades he worked in real estate and high-tech in California, and briefly in Reston, Va. In the 1980s he played a leading role in halting construction of a nuclear power plant in Marin County. In 2005 he launched a freelance-indexing business. Richard loved ideas, books, music, dogs, and sailboats.
He is survived by his children, Nathaniel, Honore, Benjamin, and Daniel; two grandchildren; and his former spouses Louise, Barbara, and Susannah.
Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.