In Memoriam

Claudia Jane Clark, associate professor of history at Central Michigan University, died on 20 September 2002, in Washington, D.C. She was forty-nine. A graduate of Rider College, Claudia worked for a time in the chemical industry, where she developed the skepticism about employers' concerns for worker safety that informed her later scholarly studies. Returning to study at Rutgers University, she earned a Ph.D. in 1991 in United States and women's history. After a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the history of medicine at Emory University, she came to Central Michigan University in 1993, where she taught U.S. history, Michigan history, and environmental studies.

It was typical of Claudia's determination to do justice to her subjects and to historical standards that she delayed publication, while insisting on naming specific individuals in her book, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Dramatic as well as scholarly, this book described the devastating effects of radium dial painting on young women employed in the industry and the campaign to secure justice for workers in this hazardous occupation. Radium Girls won the Arthur Viseltear Prize (1998) of the American Public Health Association for the outstanding book in the history of public health in America, and the story caught the attention not only of health professionals and historians but also of a wider public.

Continuing her concern with industrial health, Claudia undertook historical studies of the effects on workers of both fatigue and benzene and had begun a larger work on how pioneers in actuarial science formulated an ideology of public health when, in the fall of 1999, she underwent surgery for colon cancer. She was teaching temporarily at Miami University in Ohio while awaiting the resolution--ultimately successful--of a tenure conflict with the administration at Central Michigan University and much appreciated the kindness shown her at Miami in this emergency. Constantly hoping to return to the classroom at Central Michigan, she never recovered sufficiently, though she fought the disease with skill and spunk. Claudia Clark accomplished much in a short career as a professional historian, but she should have had more time.

Dean L. May, historian of the American West, died 6 May 2003, following a heart attack. He was Professor of History at the University of Utah from 1977 to 2003, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and cultural history, and community and family studies. As Fulbright guest professor at the University of Bonn, Germany and Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, he taught American Studies. He was a longtime member of the Utah State Board of History, editor of the Journal of Mormon History (1982-1985), and president of the Mormon History Association (2002).

Dean Lowe May was born in Worland, Wyoming, on 6 April 1938, to Frank Peter and Wanda Lowe May, and at age nine moved with his family to a forty-acre farm near Middleton, Idaho, west of Boise. He retained a strong attachment to rural life. He married Cheryll Lynn May in 1967--she and their three children were his chief delight.

In 1974, Dean joined the history division of the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He was part of the team of young scholars who worked with Leonard J. Arrington to forward Mormon history scholarship in that heady era Dean titled "The Arrington Spring." Previously, he had received a master's degree in history from Harvard University (1967), and had completed a Ph.D. at Brown University (1974), with a thesis entitled "From New Deal to New Economics: The Response of Henry Morganthau, Jr. and Marriner S. Eccles to the Recession of 1937." Dean's training in economic thought and history and the Idaho roots he shared with Arrington resulted in their collaboration on a study of community and cooperation among the Mormons, Building the City of God (Deseret Book, 1976; University of Illinois Press, 1992). During 1974, Dean was a fellow at the Newberry Library and Community History Institute, where he learned the quantitative methods that became an integral part of his studies of Kanab, Utah and other western communities. Building the City of God established the motifs that would become the signature of Dean's scholarship: the importance of community and unity, the tension between community and individuality, and the reality of and compassion for human imperfection and failure.

In 1977, Dean accepted a position in the History Department at the University of Utah, and he served for the next six years as director of the university's Center for Historical Population Studies. He was a distinguished teacher who was passionately devoted to thousands of students. In 1985, in an effort to enhance curriculum for his Utah history course, he completed an award-winning twenty-segment video series entitled A People's History of Utah--still viewed in hundreds of Utah classrooms. In 1987, he published a supplementary text by the same title. The preface reveals his aims as a historian: "History belongs to the people. Though there must be discourse among the scholars--fierce debates and exchanges on arcane topics in professional meetings and journals--the product, to justify our endeavor, must ultimately be accessible to all" (ix).

Dean presented papers at meetings of Western History, Mormon History, and Social Science History Associations. His nearly four dozen articles were published in Utah Historical Quarterly, Idaho Yesterdays, Journal of Mormon History, Sociology and Social Research, Population Studies, Agricultural History, Church History, and Journal of Family History. His last book, Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West: 1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), brilliantly employs quantitative methods and personal histories to explore three agricultural communities and the forces that moved them toward individualistic or community values.

Dean was an avid gardener, he loved choral music and sang for eight years with the Utah Symphony Chorus, and in 2001 he was teacher and president of the Christian Radich, a three-masted sailing ship that made a transatlantic voyage commemorating Mormon converts' pre-steam sea crossings. Dean was a devoted Mormon or Latter-day Saint. He personally achieved a remarkable equilibrium between his commitment to community and his need for individual expression. As a result, his was a voice of equanimity and compassion in the 1990s, when painful differences fissured the Mormon intellectual community.

Robert Goldberg, colleague and friend in the University of Utah History Department observed that Dean "was never an academic living in an ivory tower. He smelled, felt, and tasted the history of this state. He was not just a Mormon and not just a Utahn. Dean could reach into other people's lives and cultures and be one with them" (Salt Lake Tribune, 8 May 2003). Dean May reached into the lives of hundreds of colleagues and students who will miss him for years to come.

E. James Ferguson, Professor Emeritus of History at Queens College of the City University of New York, died on 11 September 2002, in Silver Springs, Maryland. He was born in Utah in 1917, a few months before the United States entered World War I. His family was not well circumstanced and Jim experienced the hardships of the Great Depression in full as a young man. Despite his lack of resources, he attended the University of Washington, completed a B.A. in 1939 and a M.S. in 1941, and met Louise Walker, with whom he enjoyed a marriage of fifty-nine years. He served in the U. S. Army Signal Corps in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands from 1941 until the war's end.

After his discharge, Jim completed his doctorate in 1951 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison under the direction of Merrill Jensen. His dissertation, "Revenue Power and the Movement for National Government, 1780-1790," set him on a path to unchallenged eminence in the field of economic history of the American Revolution and Confederation Period. In 1947, he accepted an instructorship at the University of Maryland, where he rose to the rank of associate professor before accepting an appointment as professor at Queens College of The City University of New York in 1964. The author and editor of several books and articles, he is best known for The Power of the Purse (Chapel Hill, N.C., Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1961), which was awarded the American Historical Association's John H. Dunning Prize in 1962. Jim also received awards from the Institute of Early American History and Culture, the American Philosophical Society, and Guggenheim and Huntington Library Fellowships.

A chance meeting with Richard Hexter of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette led to a grant from the firm which launched Jim as founding editor of The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781-1784 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973-1999). His expertise in the field won longstanding support for the project from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. A superb editor with an unfailing eye for murky prose and excess verbiage, Jim gave the project firm and inspired direction from 1968 until a serious injury forced him to retire in 1980. His characteristic intensity, ruggedness, and fierce determination marked his fight for recovery. As soon as he was able, he continued to critique forthcoming volumes and to provide support for the graduate students he had trained as editors. They and the field of Revolutionary and Confederation financial history will always remain in his debt.