Obituaries |
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Edward Topping James Edward T. James, the editor of Supplements Three and Four of the Dictionary of American Biography and co-editor (with his wife Janet Wilson James) of Notable American Women, 1607-1950, died on 17 April 2001, in Norwood, Massachusetts. Born in Chicago on 26 July 1917, he attended the famed Francis Parker School and went on to Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1938. His college roommate, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., describes him affectionately in a recent memoir as a "decent, reticent and forbearing young man." During the Second World War Ed James served as a lieutenant commander in the U. S. Navy. After the war he returned to graduate studies at Harvard, taking his doctorate in 1954. A modest man of great integrity, he was an intelligent, careful, methodical editor. The three volumes and 1,350 sketches of Notable American Women both stimulated and undergirded the belated boom in women's history. He later edited the Papers of the Women's Trade Union League and its Principal Leaders (1981). Though he lived primarily in Massachusetts, he had a lifelong devotion to Pentwater, Michigan, and returned in summers to the family cottage on Pentwater's North Beach. His last years were complicated by Alzheimer's disease, and he died of heart failure, leaving a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren. Memorials may be made to the Pentwater Historical Society, Pentwater, Michigan 49449. Taft Alfred Larson Taft Alfred Larson, "Mr. Wyoming History," died in Santa Ana, California on 26 January 2001. Few historians have had such a checkered set of career changes, and few have exercised such a profound influence over the study of a state's past. At the same time, T.A. "Al" Larson wore his notoriety lightly and graced his teaching, his writing, and his life with soft-spoken wit and good cheer. Born to Swedish immigrant parents on a farm in eastern Nebraska on 18 January 1910, Al Larson and his siblings grew up in the small town of Wakefield. Their mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. While their father managed his farm from Wakefield, an aunt helped raise the five children. A local teacher/administrator convinced Fred Larson to send his sons to college. While his brothers attended the University of Nebraska, a childhood bronchial condition prompted T.A. to seek the drier climate of the University of Colorado at Boulder. At first interested in a career in journalism, Larson found himself so impressed by an inspiring freshman instructor that he switched majors to history. During the summers, he worked in Yellowstone National Park in northwestern Wyoming. With a bachelor's and master's degree from Colorado, Larson pursued doctoral studies at the University of Illinois during the Great Depression. In 1936, he completed his Ph.D. degree in medieval history with a dissertation entitled, "The Assistance Demanded by the English Crown from the Clergy in the Reign of Edward III." During academic years 1936-1937 and 1938-1939, he held one-year sabbatical replacement positions at the University of Wyoming. Looking toward publishing portions of his dissertation, Larson borrowed money from his brother in 1937 to help finance a year's research in the British Public Records Office. To economize in London, he shared a bed with another young man—with Al’s sleeping in it at night and his colleague's sleeping during the day. He would buy one can of salmon a day, eating half of it for lunch and the remainder for dinner. Since he had to pay separately for his baths, T.A. Larson developed the lifelong habit of bathing in as little water as possible. In 1939, Department Head Laura White invited Larson back to the University of Wyoming for a tenure track position, but the offer came with a career-altering twist. A trained medievalist, Larson would have to develop a new course on the history of Wyoming—an offering previously taught by the late Grace Raymond Hebard, an especially controversial campus figure. Al found that the sources for the class were few and scattered, but he set about retraining himself and building the course almost from scratch. A self-confessed "workaholic," Larson taught four to five classes a term, maintained an open door office policy for students, and worked on his research on Saturdays and Sundays. His was a torrid pace, one that he maintained for over thirty-five years. There would be occasional breaks—as when he served three years in the Navy completing a history of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, or when he won a Carnegie grant permitting him to teach in the General Studies program at Columbia University in 1950-1951, or when fellowships took him to the Huntington Library for research. By the mid-1950s, T.A. Larson was the acknowledged authority on the state’s past and a rising figure in western U.S. history. Stanford University Press released his first book, Wyoming's War Years, 1941-1945 in 1954. In 1965, the University of Nebraska Press first published his classic textbook, History of Wyoming, which won the American Association for State and Local History's Award of Merit. His volume on Wyoming in the Bicentennial State Histories series, released in 1977, won near universal praise from reviewers. Meanwhile, in 1968, he had published with the University of Nebraska Press Bill Nye's Western Humor, from which he extracted many light-hearted public presentations. Larson's professional trademarks were prodigious research and fact-based arguments, sprinkled with occasional bursts of unexpected wry humor. He became a pioneer in the emerging field of women's history, especially the history of the suffrage movement in the West. He served as president of the Western History Association, culminating his term in 1971 with a presidential address entitled, "Emancipating the West’s Dolls, Vassals and Hopeless Drudges: The Origins of Women’s Suffrage in the West." Focusing largely on the cases of Wyoming and Utah, he debunked some of the older stereotypes about tea parties and sketched a multi-causational explanation for the West’s early leadership in the suffrage fight. Despite his growing regional reputation, Al Larson stayed close to home. Hoping to improve town/gown relations, he joined a variety of civic groups, helped found the Wyoming State Historical Society, and was a charter member and chair of the Wyoming Council for the Humanities. From 1948 to 1969, he chaired the History Department, leading that academic unit during the period of its most dramatic expansion. From 1959 to 1968, he served as director of the School of American Studies and from 1968 to 1976 as William Robertson Coe Chair. While directing four Ph.D. dissertations and seventy-five M.A. theses to completion, he provided faculty leadership on a number of controversial issues, most notably a 1947 textbook censorship conflict with the administration and Board of Trustees. For his campus service, he won a distinguished faculty award and an honorary doctor of laws degree. In retirement, from 1977 to 1985, he served in the state legislature, along with some twelve to fifteen of his former students. Battling increasingly severe respiratory problems after leaving the legislature, T.A. Larson began taking his winters in California in the 1990s. Divorced once and widowed once, he is survived by his wife Dorothy Larson (also a widow of his late brother), by one stepdaughter, and by a daughter, Professor Mary Lou Larson of the UW Anthropology Department. Memorials should be directed to the Larson/McGee Endowment in care of the University of Wyoming Foundation.
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