John Merriman (1946–2022) was the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University. He wrote and edited many works on French and European history, including, most recently, Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree that Gripped Belle Époque Paris; Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune; and The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror. Merriman won the 2017 American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction for lifetime achievement.