In memoriam: Charles Lockwood

Oxford mourns the passing of Charles Lockwood, historian and author.

Charles Lockwood, co-author (with his brother John) of The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days that Shook the Union, died last week of cancer at 63.

Charles’ specialty was architecture; he wrote one of the most respected books on New York City’s townhouses, Bricks and Brownstone, which is still in print with Rizzoli after forty years.

A native of Washington, D.C., Charles was equally fascinated by that city’s past and by Civil War history. He combined them in The Siege of Washington, a meticulously researched and vibrantly narrated evocation of the early days of the war, when it seemed more than possible that the almost-undefended federal capital would fall to the Confederacy. Charles immersed himself in the primary documents of the period, and his book combines drama and detail, reflective of the passion and precision he brought to everything that he worked on.

T.D. Bent is Executive Editor of history titles at Oxford University Press.