OBITUARIES / PASSINGS / Steven Lee Carson

Steven Lee Carson, 66, a former archivist and editor who became a historian and lecturer on presidential history, notably as an authority on the life of President Lincoln, died March 27 at his home in Silver Spring, Md., after a heart attack.

During the last few years, he was a presidential historian at the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, D.C. He spent his early career at the National Archives, as well as writing for and editing the Manuscript Society News and other publications aimed at librarians, archivists and curators.

He wrote a play about Robert Todd Lincoln, the only child of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln to live into adulthood. The play was staged in the mid-1980s at Ford’s Theatre.

Carson also chaired a conference on presidential children. He was a New York native and as a young man attended meetings of the Civil War Round Table with his mother. He was an American history graduate of New York University, where he was granted a Ford Foundation fellowship. He earned a master’s in American history at Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded another fellowship.