J. P. Nettl (US historian) Add a review

John Peter Nettl (1926–1968) was a historian best known for his two-volume biography of Rosa Luxemburg, which The New York Times described as a classic work that did full justice to her political activity, context, theoretical contributions, and personality.

He was born in 1926 in Czechoslovakia. He went to school at Marlborough and Oxford. He served in British army intelligence during the Second World War. He worked briefly for his family's business, but in 1963 returned to academia as a reader in politics and social studies at Oxford then Leeds. He married Marietta Nettl and together they had three children. He had recently accepted a chair of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania when he was one of the 32 people killed (out of 42 total passengers and crew) when Northeast Airlines Flight 946 crashed in Hanover, New Hampshire on October 25, 1968. He was traveling with his wife who survived and was treated for a fractured arm.