E. Bradford Burns, prolific author of books on Latin America and a popular UCLA history professor for nearly three decades, has died. Burns, who had retired from UCLA in 1993, died December 19 of liver cancer in his Hollywood Hills home. An expert on Brazil and Nicaragua, Burns was singled out for public rebuke by former President Ronald Reagan for his 1987 book _At War in Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia_. After Reagan's comments won the historian nationwide publicity, including an appearance on "Nightline," Burns typically shrugged off the attention as his "15 minutes of fame." Born in Muscatine, Iowa, Burns earned his degreees at the University of Iowa and Tulane and Columbia universities. He began teaching at Rutgers and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He joined UCLA's history department in 1964 and wrote his first book two years later, _The Unwritten Alliance: Rio Branco and Brazilian-American Relations_. The book earned the Bolton Prize and Brazil's honorary designation in the Order of Rio Branco. The historian's last published book was in 1991, _Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798-1858_. He had recently completed a history of Iowa, _Kinship With the Land_, which will be published later this year. From 1979 to 1983, Burns served as the first dean of the honors division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
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