“Lectures are excellent, and I never felt sleepy in class again after the first lecture,” wrote one student.

“Tears came to my eyes,” wrote another.

To his teaching assistants, Gienapp was known as the “general to his loyal troops,” while Gienapp called his TF’s the “Mudville 9.”

Yet, despite his dedication to the subject of history, Gienapp’s philosophy was to never take it too seriously.

“The reality was that he had a sense of humor about the entire academic enterprise,” Vorenberg said. He said that many times, when students or fellow colleagues held academic discourse with Gienapp, he would have this “inscrutable” expression on his face, as if there was an inside joke about the whole conversation that only he understood.

Gienapp was also remembered as a dedicated family man.

Maizlish said that when Gienapp was doing research for his dissertation, he could not face leaving his wife, so he postponed his research.

“In my 33 years here, I have never heard such adjectives used to describe a person and certainly never a person from the history department,” said Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church Peter J. Gomes.

Gienapp is survived by his wife Erica, two sons William Gienapp ’01 and Jonathan E. Gienapp ’06, his mother Jane and two brothers.