{{short description|American historian}} {{Use mdy dates|date=December 2020}} '''Leon Wolff''' (September 2, 1914 – October 11, 1991)<ref name="death">''California, Death Index, 1940-1997''</ref><ref>''Cook County, Illinois, Birth Certificates Index, 1871–1922''</ref> was an American historian who wrote ''In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign''.
==Biography== Wolff was born and raised in Chicago<ref>''U.S. WWII Draft Cards Young Men, 1940–1947''</ref> in a Jewish family, the son of Abe Wolff, a traveling salesman, and Bessie Billow, a Russian emigrant.<ref>''1940 United States Federal Census''</ref><ref>''U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936–2007''</ref> He graduated from Northwestern University, then served as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/W/L/au28496424.html|title=Leon Wolff|publisher=University of Chicago Press|access-date=2019-09-26}}</ref>
After the war, he started a correspondence school, the Lincoln School of Practical Nursing, in Chicago. In 1953, he and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he transplanted the business and cultivated his interests in golf and jazz. Wolff wrote four books over the next dozen years.Low-Level ''Mission'' (1957) described World War II's Operation Tidal Wave against the Ploești oil fields in Romania, by the US Army Air Forces. ''In Flanders Field: The 1917 Campaign'' (1958), an account of the World War I offensive in 1917, otherwise known as the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele. Wolff also wrote the Francis ParkmanPrize-winning-winning book ''Little Brown Brother'' (1961), originally subtitled ''How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn'',<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/484016.Little_Brown_Brother|title=Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippines|website=Goodreads|access-date=2019-09-26}}</ref> then wrote a final book, ''Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892'' (1965), about the eponymous steel strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania.<ref>{{cite book|last=Kramer|first=Paul A. |chapter-url=http://www.paulkrameronline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/wolffintro.pdf|chapter=Introduction: Decolonizing the History of the Philippine–American War|date=December 8, 2005|title=Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn|edition=Francis Parkman Prize|pages=ix–xviii|isbn=1-58288-209-6|access-date=2019-09-26}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine|url=https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/leon-wolff-3/lockout-3/|title=Lockout|magazine=Kirkus Reviews|access-date=2019-09-26}}</ref>
He died in Los Angeles in 1991.<ref name="death"/>
==References== {{reflist}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Wolff, Leon}} Category:1914 births Category:1991 deaths Category:20th-century American historians Category:American male non-fiction writers Category:American military historians Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent Category:Historians from Illinois Category:Historians of World War I Category:American historians of World War II Category:Jewish American historians Category:Labor historians Category:Northwestern University alumni Category:United States Army Air Forces officers Category:United States Army Air Forces personnel of World War II Category:Writers about activism and social change Category:Writers from Chicago Category:20th-century American Jews Category:20th-century American male writers
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