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Maurice G. Baxter
Maurice G. Baxter, emeritus professor of history at Indiana University, died on 18 October 2002 in Bloomington, Indiana at the age of eighty-two. Maurice Baxter was born September 22, 1920, in Augusta, Illinois, and grew up in the Mississippi River town of Quincy. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1941 and received his M.A. in history in 1942. Upon completing the M.A., he joined the U.S. Navy and served four years as a line officer in the Pacific during World War II. He returned to Illinois following his discharge from military service and received the Ph.D. in 1948. His dissertation, a study of Illinois lawyer and politician Orville Browning, completed under the direction of James G. Randall, became the basis of his first book, Orville H. Browning: Lincoln&closesingle;s Friend and Critic (Indiana University Press, 1957).
Baxter joined the history department of Indiana University in 1948, where he taught courses in nineteenth- century U.S. history and U.S. constitutional history for forty-three years, until his retirement in 1991. In the course of his tenure at Indiana he served as department chair from 1977 to 1980. He loved teaching and he was dedicated to the education and well-being of undergraduate and graduate students.
His own research focused on the legal and political career of Daniel Webster. His book Daniel Webster and the Supreme Court (University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), which examined not only legal decisions but the background of cases and the arguments advanced in court, was the first comprehensive study of Webster&closesingle;s Supreme Court practice and his influence on constitutional law. He also wrote an in-depth study of Gibbons v. Ogden, The Steamboat Monopoly (Alfred Knopf, 1972). His major contribution to scholarship remains his full-scale biography of Webster, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Belknap, 1984), which was the result of years of patient and thorough study of manuscript as well as printed archival and secondary sources. In the years after his retirement from teaching he pursued his interests in the ideas of Henry Clay, which resulted in publication of Henry Clay and the American System (University Press of Kentucky, 1995) and Henry Clay the Lawyer (University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
Maurice is survived by his wife, Cynthia, of Bloomington, Indiana, and his sons Kent, of Houston, and Hugh, of Boston, and their families.
Gordon Barlow Dodds
Gordon Barlow Dodds, professor emeritus of history at Portland State University (PSU), and life member of OAH, died on August 29, 2003 following a long illness. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 12, 1932, Gordon grew up in Pennsylvania, and became a foremost historian of the westward movement, the Pacific Northwest, and the state of Oregon. He received an A. B. in 1954 from Harvard University, an M. A. in 1955 from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1958. His first job was in the Department of History at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, where he taught until departing for PSU in 1966.
A prolific scholar, Gordon was the author, coauthor, or editor of ten books including the Salmon King of Oregon (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), A Pygmy Monopolist: The Life and Doings of R. D. Hume (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1961), and Oregon: A Bicentennial History (Norton, 1977) at the appointment of the U. S. Bicentennial Commission. In this work, he set out his thesis that Oregon&closesingle;s deeply ambivalent political culture of progressivism at the margins and conservatism at the core was the mainspring of the state&closesingle;s historical development. The College that would Not Die: The First Fifty Years of Portland State University (Oregon Historical Society Press, 2000) became the university&closesingle;s official history. His text, The American Northwest: A History of Oregon and Washington (Forum Press, 1986), remains a standard reference. His articles and reviews appeared in the Journal of American History, Western Political Quarterly, Western Historical Quarterly, American Historical Review, Agricultural History, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Arizona Historical Review, and Forest History.
Gordon served as the chair of the PSU history department, (1996-1999), as graduate coordinator in the department for sixteen years, and as the first coordinator of the department&closesingle;s public history Program. He sat on the Council of the Pacific Coast branch of American Historical Association, the board of editors of Arizona and the West, Pacific Historical Review, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, and Western Historical Quarterly, and the Oregon State University Press. He was founder and board member of the Friends of History (FOH), a history department support group, which raised a substantial endowment for a yearly free lecture by a renowned historian. Gordon enthusiastically led the fundraising. He supervised more than fifty M. A. candidates. The university and the community recognized his accomplishments and in 1979, PSU bestowed on him the first Branford P. Millar Award for Faculty Excellence. He also won the PSU Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Service Award for 1997-1998.
The above does not hint at Gordon&closesingle;s overall impact on the profession, his university, and the community. &opendouble;Open handed, open hearted,&closedouble; was a quaint phrase he often used to describe kindness, but it better characterized his own behavior toward a variety of people with whom he came into contact. He passed on paid speaking engagements, consulting opportunities, and extra classes to struggling adjuncts and pleaded their cases for retention to the dean when their contracts expired. While department chair, he subsidized Thursday afternoon gatherings at a campus hangout where the department&closesingle;s newest faculty could relax, discuss, and absorb subtle mentoring. An avid supporter of PSU athletics, he was rarely absent from football and men&closesingle;s and women&closesingle;s basketball games. Gregarious in a quiet way, he periodically organized lunches at his favorite haunts, inviting faculty, staff, and students. One of his closest friends affectionately labeled him &opendouble;the social director.&closedouble; He spoke to community groups whenever requested.
On his retirement, the indefatigable Gordon was not through with PSU or its history department. He continued serving on the FOH board and started a Civil War roundtable and a history book club. He also was appointed university archivist, a job he attacked with zeal despite failing health.
In 1982, Gordon married Linda Brody. They traveled extensively, regularly served meals to the homeless, and gave their time at the Oregon Food Bank. Gordon and Linda were responsible for a wide variety of Oregon&closesingle;s nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, as well as the state register. Besides his wife, Gordon is survived by three children from his first marriage to Rosemary Johnson--Paul Dodds, Ruth Allen, and Jennifer Weisbrod--and step sons, Greg and Mark Brody and a brother, John.
Over his career, Gordon Dodds was synonymous with PSU and its history department and with the scholarship of Northwest history. It is incomprehensible that we are now forced to press on without his presence as colleague and friend. However, our task will be made easier by the warmth of his memory and his foundational work for the department and the university.
Craig Wollner
Portland State University
John Higham
John Higham, distinguished historian of American culture and ethnic relations, respected commentator on the discipline, and former president of the Organization of American Historians, passed away July 26 at his home in Baltimore. Eighty-two years old, Higham died a historian&closesingle;s death, expiring in his sleep on the night he completed a new essay on American ethnic history. Only months before, the American Historical Association and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society had presented him with their Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Like other leading historians of his generation, Higham was deeply affected by events surrounding World War II. The inclusive, egalitarian nationalism of the New Deal and war years remained his touchstone through five decades of shifting concerns, while the postwar hysteria left him critical of American xenophobia. Born in Queens, New York, in 1920 into a Protestant family with Midwestern roots, Higham credited high school friendships with second generation Americans for inspiring his vision of a shared culture that prized ethnic variety. Drawn to the democratic socialism of Norman Thomas and Harold Laski while an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, Higham opposed the anti-Communist furor that was building when he graduated in 1941. After serving from 1943 to 1945 in Italy with the Historical Division of the U.S. Army Air Force, he worked as an assistant at the American Mercury before moving to the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his doctorate under Merle Curti in 1949. By then Higham had settled upon his lifelong liberal nationalist beliefs, but he remained independent and distrustful of polarized ideologies. Standing above the fray, Higham sought to encompass American oppositions in larger unities. He became an &opendouble;optimistic contrarian&closedouble; who kept his faith in the egalitarian and cosmopolitan possibilities of American culture even as he criticized its excesses and acknowledged its conflicted legacy.
Beginning in 1948, Higham taught at UCLA, Rutgers, and Columbia University, then at the University of Michigan from 1961 to 1971 as Moses Coit Tyler Professor of History. In 1973 he moved permanently to Johns Hopkins as John Martin Vincent Professor of History. That year Higham was elected president of the OAH. These appointments were augmented by many prestigious fellowships and lectureships in the United States and abroad.
Higham was a committed generalist whose writings made landmark contributions to several fields of American history. Higham&closesingle;s signature gifts--his panoramic vision, precise distinctions, and elegant exposition--were displayed in two definitive books, several edited volumes, and more than thirty jewel-like essays. The latter were collected in three volumes, Writing American History (Indiana University Press, 1970), Send These To Me (Atheneum, 1975; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), and Hanging Together (Yale University Press, 2001).
Higham&closesingle;s classic, Strangers in the Land (Rutgers University Press, 1955), chronicled the struggle between what would later be called &opendouble;ethnic&closedouble; and &opendouble;civic&closedouble; nationalisms as immigration and nativism crested in the Gilded Age and early twentieth century. While clearly a response to the xenophobia of the McCarthy years, Strangers remains compelling after a half century because of its dramatic, morally engaged presentation of ideas and impulses that continue to bedevil Americans. After nativism, Higham shifted to studying ethnicity. As early as 1958 he began examining the ways ethnic groups interacted and how they related to the nation. His 1974 article, &opendouble;Another American Dilemma&closedouble; in Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America, which he updated in 1999, embodied Higham&closesingle;s fullest appreciation of the dynamic mixture of assimilation and ethnic persistence--&opendouble;pluralistic integration&closedouble;--that he believed constituted the nation&closesingle;s best ethnic tradition.
Intellectual and cultural history was a second arena in which Higham made vital interventions. Strangers attempted to reconcile &opendouble;idealist&closedouble; and &opendouble;materialist&closedouble; approaches to intellectual history, contrasting legacies left to Higham by Arthur O. Lovejoy at Hopkins and Merle Curti at Wisconsin. Higham&closesingle;s early essays on intellectual history charted the field&closesingle;s development and suggested new strategies that might comprehend all of American culture. His classic pieces on major turning points in the 1850s and 1890s modeled a synthetic cultural history that captured the &opendouble;spirit of the age.&closedouble; When the upheavals of the late 1960s seemed to outmode such unitary cultural approaches, Higham took up the challenge of the new social history. Through a conference that he and Paul Conkin organized to explore the institutional contexts of ideas, whose proceedings were published as New Directions in American Intellectual History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), Higham helped to revive and redirect the field.
Devoted to the craft and conversation of historians, Higham monitored the swinging pendulum of historical discourse and acted as a damper against its extremes. In the late 1950s he gave the name to &opendouble;consensus&closedouble; history and criticized it for homogenizing American society and uncritically celebrating its past. In 1965 Higham published History: Professional Scholarship in America (Prentice-Hall, 1965), which remains the point of departure for understanding the development of the discipline&closesingle;s Americanist segment. That same year he marched in Selma with a small contingent of liberal historians. By the 1970s, however, Higham deplored the fragmentation and extreme anti-nationalist views that seemed to overtake American society and historiography. In response, his work in ethnic and cultural history changed course to emphasize the quiet connections that joined Americans together and the heritage of &opendouble;universalist&closedouble; ideals that he hoped would inspire them. Higham&closesingle;s edited volume, Civil Rights and Social Wrongs (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), traced the working of those ideals in American black-white relations. In &opendouble;The Future of American History,&closedouble; published in the Journal of American History in 1994, Higham reasserted the case for a national history in dialogue with subnational groups and transnational patterns. Throughout these controversies Higham remained dispassionate, caring deeply about ideas and their consequences yet never personalizing disagreements.
A fourth Higham preoccupation, less a field than a method, was comparative history. Trained as an undergraduate in European history, Higham sought larger contexts and connections for U.S. history and framed several essays on American immigration and culture in comparative terms. A book-length project on ethnic relations in Hawaii, Fiji, and Mauritius begun in the 1970s was never completed, although preliminary research can be glimpsed in his edited collection, Ethnic Leadership in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Higham used invited lectures in Australia, Asia, and Europe, especially a year at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1981-1982), as occasions for comparative forays, and he encouraged transnational approaches among younger scholars.
After he retired to emeritus status in 1989 Higham addressed trends in all four fields in thoughtful essays on their latest manifestations: multiculturalism, the social history of intellectuals, the problem of historical synthesis, and the internationalization of U.S. history. He also remained active as a commentator at conferences and reviewer of books, roles he played with characteristic balance and penetration. Revising his own essays and books, he eagerly adjusted his insights to new findings but kept faithful to his lifelong liberal nationalist convictions.
Tall and lean, speaking very deliberately in a resounding bass, Higham was an imposing intellectual presence. As a lecturer he exuded authority and inspired awe, but he preferred small seminars where he and students could examine readings on a more equal footing. Serious about ideas, he held himself and others to high standards but treated fellow inquirers after truth, from students to senior colleagues, with equal respect. Higham was a conscientious and generous mentor to his graduate students and an encouraging coach to other fledgling scholars. He supervised over two dozen dissertations in areas ranging from intellectual history and popular culture to ethnic, labor, and women&closesingle;s history. His devotion to the common enterprise of history opened him to a wide circle of friends and correspondents, with whom he continued to exchange work in progress until his final days.
Higham is survived by his wife of fifty-five years, Eileen Moss, a clinical psychologist, as well as four children and seven grandchildren. His working papers are being housed at Johns Hopkins, and plans are underway to establish a national travel grant for graduate students in his name. Within the historical community his loss will be deeply felt by many colleagues, friends and admirers.
Carl J. Guarneri
Saint Mary&closesingle;s College of California
Susan Estabrook Kennedy
Susan Estabrook Kennedy, professor of history and chair of the Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, died on 15 June 2003, after a short illness at age sixty-one. Born in New York City, she received her undergraduate education at Marymount Manhattan College, and did her graduate work at Columbia University, where she received an M.A. in 1965, and her doctorate in 1971. Her dissertation on the banking crisis of 1933, done under the supervision of William E. Leuchtenburg, was a finalist for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, and the judges recommended that the University Press of Kentucky publish it, which it did as The Banking Crisis of 1933 (University Press of Kentucky, 1973). After teaching briefly at Hunter College and Temple University, she came to Virginia Commonwealth in 1972, and remained there the rest of her career.
Susan had multiple careers at VCU. Primarily she was a highly regarded teacher and a role model to women students seeking to enter the profession. In addition to numerous articles, she also wrote the first study of white working class women, If All We Did Was to Weep at Home (Indiana University Press, 1979), as well as a bibliographic volume on the topic (Garland Publishers, 1981), and for many years taught upper-division as well as graduate seminars in women&closesingle;s history. She won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and from the American Council of Learned Societies, and also was a Danforth Associate and twice a recipient of a Perrine Fellowship. Her academic love, however, was fixed on Herbert and Lou Hoover; she was thrice a Hoover Scholar at the Presidential Library, and for years had been collecting material about them. A study of Lou Henry Hoover was to have been her primary retirement project, followed by a study of Hoover after the presidency.
But Susan also had an aptitude for administration, which when recognized by senior university officials after a year as a faculty intern in the VCU president&closesingle;s office, led to her appointments as associate dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences, interim dean, and acting vice provost. In 1998 she began the first of her two terms as chair of the history department, and during her tenure proved successful in securing significant new resources as well as faculty lines for the department.
She had little notice of her cancer until just a few weeks before its diagnosis, and she determined not to let it stop her from working. While in the hospital she finished most administrative tasks that had been on her desk. She will be sorely missed by her colleagues and by her former students.
Melvin I. Urofsky
Virginia Commonwealth University
Shafali Lal
Shafali Lal, Instructor of History at Vanderbilt University, died on July 17, 2003. She had just completed her first year of teaching at the university and was working on the final chapters of her dissertation. She was thirty-two.
Shafali Lal was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1970 and grew up in Sidney, Ohio. She attended the University of Chicago and in 1992 was awarded a degree in history and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After working as a teacher at the University School of Nashville, she enrolled in the doctoral program in American Studies at Yale in 1994, where she earned an M.A. and an M.Phil. During a brief hiatus from the program, she served as Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at the Yale School of Medicine and, later, as assistant director of the Asian American Cultural Center.
Having returned to the graduate program in 1997, Shafali introduced a very successful seminar on race, ethnicity, and sexuality and began research on her dissertation, &opendouble;Securing the Children: Social Science, Children, and the Meaning of Race, 1939-1968.&closedouble; Combining social, cultural, and intellectual history, the project explored the role of child experts like Kenneth and Mamie Clark, Margaret Mead, and Robert Coles in popularizing what she called the &opendouble;psychologization of racial identity and the racialization of child development.&closedouble; Shafali&closesingle;s work had just begun to appear in print, with essays in Radical Teacher and Radical History Review.
A recipient of Andrew Mellon, Jacob Javits and Robert Leylan Fellowships, Shafali was an active contributor to graduate life at Yale. She initiated a semester-long series of symposia on American studies methods and was for a number of years a tireless organizer for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization. At the same time, she served on the OAH Committee on the Status of Women in the Historical Profession (2000-2003). As a mentor at Yale, Shafali welcomed countless new students to graduate school and served those around her as a model of intelligence, poise, generosity, and commitment. Shafali&closesingle;s intellectual interests were wide-ranging, spanning history, ethnography, ethnic and cultural studies. Her favorite discipline, though, was undoubtedly dance, for which she had an abiding love, having taught ballet at the University of Chicago Lab School. While in New Haven, she also participated in the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program. A brilliant and charismatic presence in and out of the classroom, Shafali Lal gave of herself to her family, her friends, her students, her teachers, and her colleagues--all of whom deeply mourn her loss.
She is survived by her father and mother, Mahendra and Subhadra Lal, of Sidney, Ohio, and by her sister, Maneesha, of Hartford.
Jean-Christophe Agnew
Yale University
Martin Ridge
Martin Ridge, former director of research at the Huntington Library and a professor of history at California Institute of Technology, passed away on September 22 in El Monte, California, following a lengthy illness. He was eighty years old. Ridge was a prominent figure in the historical profession and especially the Organization of American Historians. He had been past president of Western History Association (and a founding member), the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, and the Historical Society of Southern California. From 1966 to 1978, he edited the Journal of American History and was professor of history at Indiana University.
Ridge was born in Chicago on May 7, 1923. He did his undergraduate work at Chicago Teachers College, and between 1943 and 1945 was in the United States Merchant Marines. In 1948, he enrolled at Northwestern University where he studied nineteenth century intellectual and frontier history under Ray Allen Billington. Following the completion of his Ph.D. in 1951, Ridge taught first at Westminister College, and then at San Diego State College before going to Indiana University to edit the JAH.
Ridge quickly established himself as one of the bright lights of the profession. His first book, Ignatius Donnelly: The Portrait of a Politician (University of Chicago Press, 1962) was a model biography and remains the definitive treatment of the populist leader. &opendouble;In a psychological sense,&closedouble; Ridge wrote, &opendouble;Donnelly was a true rebel&closedouble; and &opendouble;never without a feeling of alienation from the group, even when he seemed most identified with his environment . . . . Donnelly knew why he wanted to live, and so his life was bearable and he was never entirely embittered. And after all, it is the way in which a man accepts his fate, the way in which he faces his environment, that affords him the opportunity--under both pleasant and trying circumstances--to add genuine meaning to his life.&closedouble;
There followed seventeen other books that Ridge authored, coauthored, or edited, in addition to many articles and reviews that were noteworthy for their insightfulness. He collaborated with Billington to produce America&closesingle;s Frontier Story: A Documentary History of Westward Expansion (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). After Billington&closesingle;s death in 1981, Ridge assumed the authorship of his mentor&closesingle;s monumental Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (Macmillan Co.,1949; Collier Macmillan Publishers,1982; University of New Mexico Press, 2001). The book, which first appeared in 1949, was built on the insights of Frederick Jackson Turner and became the standard by which other works in the field were measured. The work reflected Billington&closesingle;s--and Ridge&closesingle;s--&opendouble;basic faith in political and social democracy.&closedouble; It was valuable not only for its engaging narrative but for its bibliography (updated with each new edition) which reflected an extraordinary mastery of the voluminous research on frontier history that had appeared since Turner&closesingle;s time.
This brief summary hardly captures Martin Ridge, the person. As he once wrote of Billington, his &opendouble;uniqueness . . . was as much in his person as in his scholarship.&closedouble; I first met Ridge in the fall of 1968, my first semester in graduate school. I was then looking for a calling but was hardly certain that I wanted to be a historian. His seminar on recent U. S. history changed all that. He had an exceptionally agile mind, a quick wit, and a command of the literature far beyond that of anyone I had met up to that time and one matched subsequently by very few people. He was a demanding teacher, intolerant of mediocre effort, yet fair-minded. The note taking system, which I use to this day, remains the single most valuable thing I learned in graduate school. &opendouble;A good note,&closedouble; he said, &opendouble;is a joy forever.&closedouble; It was one of &opendouble;Ridge&closesingle;s Rules.&closedouble; (&opendouble;Never buy yourself a drink at a convention&closedouble; was another.) More than that, Ridge demonstrated a standard for what high quality scholarship required. His passion for American history was contagious. At the end of the term, I knew that I wanted to be a historian.
Ridge brought that ardor to the JAH. He was best known as a historian of the American West, but his interests were wide-ranging. He was committed to publishing the best scholarship, regardless of methodology or ideology. Those of us who had the good fortune to work as editorial assistants during that time (we were affectionately known as the &opendouble;serfs&closedouble;) learned a great deal about the profession. He engaged us in the substance of the Journal and there were surely few more interesting places to study American history during the mid-1970s. We saw the best scholarship months before it appeared in print and most of the essays that were turned down eventually wound up published, often in good journals. &opendouble;I can&closesingle;t wait to get to the office to read this material,&closedouble; he once confided. Martin Ridge was a good citizen and fascinated by politics. He believed in the dignity of the individual and in social justice. He championed the right of free inquiry and defended those who tried to speak the truth, even when that effort was unpopular. He touched many people as a teacher, writer, editor, and friend. His friends will miss his sense of humor and stimulating company. Students of the American past have lost an enlightened scholar.
Stephen Vaughn
University of Wisconsin, Madison
William Reed Steckel
William Reed Steckel, who taught American colonial history at the University of Wyoming for thirty-one years, died in Gainesville, Florida, on June 19, 2003. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Steckel was born on February 11, 1915 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. After earning his A.B. and A.M. degrees (in 1936 and 1937) from Harvard, he served as private secretary to the American minister to Denmark and traveled extensively throughout western Europe. Between 1938 and 1941 he taught at military academies in Ohio and California. During World War II, Steckel was a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific. He then began graduate studies in history at Stanford University, where he completed a dissertation under Max Savelle on Christopher Saur, a prominent German printer in colonial Pennsylvania.
Joining the UW faculty in 1949, Steckel won funding from the Fulbright Program and the American Philosophical Society and published several articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He lectured at Goethe University in Germany and was visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego. In 1965, he coedited a two-volume reader, Patterns in American History (Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1965) which found its way into the hands ofthousands of undergraduates around the country.
At UW, Steckel served as the first director of the American Studies Program, was president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and chaired the Faculty Senate during the controversial &opendouble;Black Fourteen&closedouble; and &opendouble;Flagpole&closedouble; incidents of 1969-1970. In 1979, incoming UW President Ed Jennings tapped him for a one-year term as Vice President for Academic Affairs. He also won a variety of teaching awards. In the 1980s, one especially appreciative former student endowed the William Steckel Undergraduate Scholarships in History, which have assisted dozens of students to complete their degrees. In 1997, the College of Arts and Sciences recognized him as one of its Outstanding Former Faculty members.
During his half-century in Laramie, Steckel was an engaged community leader. A ruling elder of the Union Presbyterian Church, he wrote the church history. During his tenure as mayor of Laramie in 1963-1964, he helped host John F. Kennedy during the president&closesingle;s visit to the city. An expert skier, Steckel enjoyed photography, travel, fishing, and the family cabin in the country. His wife, Veva Haehl Steckel, preceded him in death in 2000, and his son, William Burrel Steckel, died in April 2003.
William Howard Moore
University of Wyoming
Bennett H. Wall
Bennett H. Wall, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Georgia and Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Historical Association (SHA) for thirty-three years, died on August 1, 2003, in Athens, Georgia, of complications following surgery. He was eighty-eight years old.
No individual has been more closely associated with the Southern Historical Association than Ben Wall. He took over as its chief administrator while at the University of Kentucky in 1952, and continued to oversee its operation until 1985, when its offices had moved with Ben to the University of Georgia. Ben served as president of the SHA in 1987-1988. During his lengthy tenure as Secretary-Treasurer, Wall oversaw the growth of the SHA from a relatively small association of just over 1,400 members to the nation&closesingle;s third largest historical organization (after the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association) with well over 4,500 members. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he worked effectively, usually behind the scenes, to smooth the way for integrated conferences, often a challenge at convention hotels in the not yet desegregated South. In 1965, Wall organized southern historians and other academics to join Martin Luther King&closesingle;s march in Selma, Alabama.
Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1914, Wall earned his B.A. degree from Wake Forest University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1941 and 1946 respectively. From 1944 to 1964, he taught history at the University of Kentucky. In 1974, he moved to Tulane University, taking the SHA offices with him. He served as department chair for six years. In 1980, Wall moved to Athens, where he spent the last five years of his teaching career.
During his years at Tulane, Wall established himself as a leading historian of Louisiana. He edited the state&closesingle;s most popular and durable history, Louisiana: A History (Forum Press, 1984), which first appeared in l984 and was reissued in new editions in 1990, 1997, and 2002. In 1974, he served as president of the Louisiana Historical Association, and remained an active member until his death. In 1993, the LHA recognized his contributions with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
But it is as a business historian on which Wall&closesingle;s scholarly reputation rests most firmly. His first book, Teagle of Jersey Standard (Tulane University Press, 1974), coauthored with George S. Gibb, was a biography of Walter C. Teagle, who headed Standard Oil in the 1930s. In 1988, he published his massive study, Growth in a Changing Environment: A History of the Standard Oil Company, 1950-1972, and Exxon Corporation, 1972-1975 (McGraw-Hill, 1988). From 1974 to 1980, Wall served as director of Tulane University&closesingle;s Center for Business History Studies. His presidential address at the Southern Historical meeting in l988--published in the Journal of Southern History in February l989--was entitled &opendouble;Breaking Out: What is Not in Southern History, 1918-1988.&closedouble; In it, he bemoaned the lack of attention given to business, industry and entrepreneurship by southern historians, and issued a call for more work on the economic and business history of the modern South in particular. In part because of his firm commitment to generating such scholarship, the SHA created a book prize in 2000, the Bennett H. Wall Award, to be given on a biennial basis to a distinguished business or economic history set in the South.
Wall directed fifteen dissertations at Kentucky and Tulane, but endeared himself to legions of other former students as well, including a whole generation of graduate students at the University of Georgia who he and his wife Neva entertained regularly in their home long after his retirement. Always a colorful raconteur, many of Wall&closesingle;s stories and memories have been recorded on both audio and videotape. Much of this is now housed and accessible at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and provides a rich oral history of the SHA, including accounts of his associations with a number of southern history&closesingle;s most distinguished practitioners.
Many friends, admirers, colleagues, and former students attended a memorial service for Wall held in Athens in September, where John Hope Franklin and Wendell Berry were among those who delivered moving tributes to him. It was followed, per Ben&closesingle;s request, by a lively party, complete with jazz band, and hosted by Neva Wall at their home, in itself a fitting tribute to Ben&closesingle;s love of life and sense of fun.
John C. Inscoe
University of Georgia
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