I. B. Holley Jr.
American historian

Irving Brinton Holley Jr. (8 February 1919 – 12 August 2013) was an American historian. He was a leading scholar in the field of American social and intellectual history, and his particular emphasis was on military history and the history of technology.
Biography
A native of Torrington, Connecticut, and graduate of Wilbraham Academy, Holley attended Amherst College and graduated in 1940 (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). He then pursued graduate work at Yale University, and for his academic success in his first year received the Tew Prize as Outstanding Scholar in History. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Holley enlisted in the United States Army and became an aerial gunner, although he still received his A.M. from Yale in 1942. His doctoral work was interrupted by his military service, and he did not receive the Ph.D. from Yale until 1947. Promoted to staff sergeant, he was an instructor at Harlingen Army Air Base in Texas. Subsequently, he attended Officer Candidate School at Miami Beach, Florida, commissioning in April 1944, and then headed a gunnery school at Charleston Army Air Base. Following that, he was assigned for technical intelligence work at the Headquarters, Air Materiel Command, at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15993089. VIAF identifies the subject as 8711013. The Library of Congress control number is n81090325. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1919, 2013, 1940 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “I. B. Holley Jr.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.