Born 8 January 1939 in White Plains, New York was the son of a well-known historian of the early American republic and editor of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton,. He graduated from Columbia University in 1961, completed his MA there in 1964 and moved to the University of London, where he completed his PhD in 1966 with a thesis on "Shipping and the American War of Independence". He became Distinguished Professor of History at Queen's College, City University of New York. His principal areas of interest were eighteenth-century British naval history and the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. He died in New York on 18 October 2004, and his widow, Elena Frangakis-Syrett, has published some of his work posthumously.