William Hickling Prescott, one of America's most famous historians, was struck down with a stroke in his library at his Beacon Hill home in Boston and died two hours later aged sixty-two. Almost blind since his college years at Harvard, he had produced remarkable works on the history and literature of Spain, especially as they concerned the New World at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. His three-volume Conquest of Mexico gained him such fame that Prescott, Arizona was named for him. (By John Osborne)