Williams insisted on putting notes and names from the day's lecture topic on the chalk board himself, writing in his cryptic scrawl which everyone soon learned to decipher.
After auditing one of Williams' classes, a professor of speech told him that his mannerisms and method of delivery would not pass muster in the Department of Speech, but that it had been a fascinating class! Williams' classes began when he walked through the door of the packed lecture hall, nodding to a student here, stopping to speak to someone there, eventually moving to the podium where his graduate assistants, who had been trailing behind him, set up maps, projection screen, or other paraphernalia in their proper places. Williams acknowledged that his speaking style was unorthodox. Under any circumstances, Williams appeared effortlessly to transfer his own enthusiasm for history to his auditors, be they undergraduates, graduate students, colleagues, the general public, or some combination of them all.
Simultaneously, he was devoted to undergraduate teaching, and those who had the good fortune to enroll in his courses found themselves entertained, entranced, and educated.
Williams enjoyed the challenges of supervising and guiding graduate students, and more than thirty earned the Ph.D. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Huey Long, his biography of Louisiana's premier politician, but he believed that the Civil War was an endlessly vibrant era, and his books on the leaders of that time include Beauregard, Napoleon in Gray, Lincoln and His Generals, Hayes of the Twenty-third, and McClellan, Sherman, and Grant. Harry Williams, history first and foremost was the study of people who had shaped the events of the past, especially the great men, evaluating them, analyzing their actions, concluding why their careers ended in tatters or triumph.
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