Also noted: Willie Lee Rose, Virginian historian, recast the prevailing view of Reconstruction

Willie Lee Rose, 91, a historian who upended the scholarly consensus of her time by shifting the blame for the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War from freed slaves and Northern interlopers to irresolute federal officials, died on June 20 in Baltimore.

Before being incapacitated by a stroke in 1978, when she was 51, Rose — a protégé of the eminent Civil War historian C. Vann Woodward — taught at the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University and became a prominent advocate for women historians.

In 1970, she concluded in a report commissioned by the American Historical Association that colleges and universities should hire more women as faculty members, arguing that this would coincide with "the permanent interest of the historical profession."

Rose's greatest legacy was her recasting of the prevailing view of Reconstruction, when federal troops occupied the defeated South and a slave-owning society was grudgingly adapting to emancipation.

"She looked at the ground level at how the end of slavery unleashed a tremendous set of conflicts over what should follow," said Columbia University historian Eric Foner.

He added, "Her book 'Rehearsal for Reconstruction' depicted Northern teachers, the Army, Treasury Department agents, Northern cotton planters and the former slaves themselves, battling over access to land, control of labor, access to education and political power."

Reviewing "Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment" (1964) for the New York Times Book Review, Amherst Prof. Henry Steele Commager wrote: "In the rewriting of history, which is continuous, historians are coming increasingly to emphasize not the sufferings of Southern whites but the betrayal of Southern Negroes as perhaps the most significant feature of the Reconstruction era.

"Rehearsal for Reconstruction," Commager wrote, "revealed not a deliberate decision to repudiate the Negro but the absence of any sense of obligation and any imagination where the Negro was concerned."

Rose focused on what she described as "the folly of the federal government's granting voting rights without providing for national assistance to education, thrusting upon the impoverished South the responsibility for a public school system that it had not possessed in its flourishing days."

"The North had plainly concluded that in granting the franchise, the national obligation to the freedmen had been fulfilled," she wrote. "The North was not so much indifferent as tired, and the nation seized simple excuses that left the Northern conscience easier."

"Rehearsal for Reconstruction" won two awards from the Society of American Historians: the Allan Nevins Prize for best dissertation and the Francis Parkman Prize for the best work of American history.

Rose was born Willie Lee Nichols on May 18, 1927, in Bedford, Va.

He began publishing stories in the 1950s, becoming one of the most popular and influential writers of science fiction of his generation.

He preferred the term "speculative fiction" and saw himself as an heir to such writers as Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. Ellison published scores of books and more than 1,500 stories, reviews and essays in a career of exceptional productivity.

Several of his stories, including " 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (1965), "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (1967) and "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World" (1968), are recognized as science fiction classics.

In his finest work, Ellison showed "at times a raging but dignified sense of the pain of the world," critic John Clute said. "He was always uniquely present in his works. You saw him pounding the table and aiming his blows."

Subtlety was not Ellison's strong suit. His writing contained a palpable sense of outrage toward injustice, ignorance and moral tawdriness.

For decades, Ellison was in demand in Hollywood as a writer and script doctor. He wrote dozens of scripts of TV shows, including "The Twilight Zone," "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," "Burke's Law," "The Outer Limits," "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and even "The Flying Nun."

He was credited with one of the most memorable episodes of "Star Trek," 1967's "The City on the Edge of Forever," in which the interplanetary travelers aboard the Starship Enterprise return to the 1930s with a chance to rewrite history.

Several times, Ellison sued Hollywood studios when he thought they had stolen his ideas, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Harlan Jay Ellison was born May 27, 1934, in Cleveland.

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