My PhD supervisor and friend, Bill Heyck, who has died aged 75, was a leading American historian of Britain, but he always maintained “the teaching of teachers” to be his most important vocation. Whenever I appeared at his office, Bill would sit up in his chair, slap the stack of books tottering on his desk, and announce with gusto: “There he is!” The PhD can be a slog, for student and supervisor alike, but on such afternoons Bill made it seem as though he had been sitting there all day just waiting to talk about Chatham or Chartism or Churchill.

Bill was born in Beaumont, Texas, to Joseph and Frances Heyck. He and his brother, Joseph, grew up in Tampa, Florida, but Bill returned to Houston, Texas, to attend Rice University, finishing with a BA in 1960 and an MA two years later. It was also in Texas that Bill met his future wife, Denis Daly. They were married on a sweltering July day in Houston in 1964. After serving in the army from 1964 to 1966, Bill completed his doctorate at the University of Texas in 1969 – by which time he was assistant professor at Northwestern University, near Chicago, Illinois, where he remained for the remainder of his career.

Bill wrote widely on Victorian political history, the social history of universities and British intellectual life, in addition to superb articles on WB Yeats and EP Thompson. He taught famous undergraduate courses on the Victorian crisis of faith, the history of environmental thought and the conflict in Northern Ireland, and his commitment to teaching as a form of scholarship culminated in his groundbreaking textbook A History of the Peoples of the British Isles (1992). The product of Bill’s insistence that “the social history revolution actually happened”, the book (now in its fourth edition) treats popular culture and social movements as no less important than politics or diplomacy.

Family, friends, colleagues and students will remember a beloved raconteur who was curious, generous, humble – and very, very funny. Bill was also a committed Episcopalian, and I like to imagine him arriving upstairs to an enthusiastic reception: “There he is!”

Bill is survived by Denis; their children, Hunter and Shannon; and his five grandchildren.