Gordon Craig, who died on October 30 at 91, was widely considered the dean of American historians of Germany.

He published several ambitious histories of modern Germany, including “Germany, 1866-1945” for the Oxford History of Modern Europe series, which is still in print and as authoritative and popular a text as when it was first published in 1979. Other histories Craig wrote included “The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945” (1955), the textbook “Europe Since 1815” (1961), and “The Germans” (1982), which drew on his considerable literary scholarship in painting a cultural portrait.

A native of Glasgow, Scotland, Craig came to America at age 12 with his parents, who settled in Jersey City, N.J. His father was a newspaper compositor. Craig entered Princeton in 1932, and was affiliated with the university as a Ph.D. student and then a professor, until 1961. He then moved to Stanford, where he joined a burgeoning history department that helped establish the university’s reputation for sterling scholarship.

“He was among a handful of people in the late 1950s and early 1960s who remade the history department,” a Dickason professor in the humanities department at Stanford, James Sheehan, said.

“[Craig’s] colleagues at Princeton were aghast when he left,” a Stanford historian, Peter Stansky, said. “That was one reason he enjoyed coming here – to tease them for being stuffy.”

A trip to Germany in 1935 left him deeply impressed with both German culture and the destructive possibilities of the Nazi regime. Shortly after, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship, and spent two years at Balliol College at Oxford University. Craig made his mark first as a diplomatic and military historian. When “The Politics of the Prussian Army” appeared in 1955, a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials, Telford Taylor, said that it spoke to Cold War questions about the role of the military in shaping civil society. Craig’s book, Telford wrote, addressed “How to stimulate esprit de corps … and still prevent the growth of ‘vested interests and bureaucratic empires in the Pentagon during the long years of military readiness that lie ahead?”

In “Germany, 1866-1945,” Craig examined the years leading up to and ending with Germany’s surrender in World War II. The book was praised particularly for its account of the Weimar years. H.R. Trevor-Roper called it “a work of great erudition, packed with detail, and of wide range, dealing with all aspects of government and social life,” yet he found it “somewhat austere.” Reviewing Craig’s monograph “Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich” (2001), Fritz Stern wrote that Craig’s “work reminds us of the now neglected principle that literature and history are, or ought to be, inseparable.”

Craig retired in 1979, but his scholarly output intensified, including books on the decline of Prussia, the cultural life of Zurich, a study of German writers and the problem of power, and numerous edited volumes. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and in 1999,a collected volume of essays from the journal was published as “Politics and Culture in Modern Germany.”

In 1996, Craig courted controversy in the pages of the New York Review when he urged historians not to reject the work of David Irving, the author of “Hitler’s War” whose anti-Semitism raised questions about his objectivity. Craig wrote that “Hitler’s War” was “the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War.” Of Irving the man, Craig wrote, “Such people … have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise,” and “we dare not disregard their views.”

“There was a kind of Scotch wisdom about him,” a co-editor of the New York Review, Robert Silvers, said. “He was a man of enormous breadth of learning, and a beautifully clear writer.”

Gordon Alexander Craig

Born November 26, 1913, in Glasgow, Scotland; died October 30 of heart failure at a nursing facility in Portola Valley, Calif.; survived by his wife of 66 years, Phyllis Craig; daughters Deborah Preston, Susan Craig, and Martha Craig; son Charles Craig; eight grandchildren; two great-grandchildren, and a sister, Jean Clarke.