In Memoriam

Joseph L. Arnold

Joseph L. Arnold, Professor of History at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, died on January 5, 2004, at the age of sixty-six. He was a vital and enormously important member of the UMBC faculty for some three and a half decades as well as a leading historian of urban and planning history.

Joe Arnold earned his B.A. from Denison and in 1968 his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. Before joining the UMBC faculty in 1968, he taught at Bowling Green State University in 1962-1963 and at what was then Southern Connecticut State College from 1965 to 1968.

Joe’s first book, The New Deal in the Suburbs: A History of the Greenbelt Town Program, 1935-1954 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971) remains the standard account of New Deal community planning. Subsequently, in addition to numerous scholarly articles and essays, he published books on the Flood Control Act of 1936; Baltimore Engineers and the Chesapeake Bay from 1961 to 1987; Maryland’s growth and development; and the development of Catonsville, Maryland, as a streetcar suburb (with Edward Orser, of UMBC’s American Studies Department). At his death, Joe was working on what will be his sixth book, a definitive study of Baltimore. He also played an active and often leading role with a variety of private and public historical institutions in the Baltimore area and at his death was hailed as the “dean of Baltimore historians.”

As a teacher and mentor, Joe guided and opened new vistas for the students who filled his classes to overflowing. His undergraduate and graduate students alike profited not only from his enormous knowledge but also from his limitless kindness, his devotion to them, his generosity, and his manifest love of learning. He helped guide the History Department and the University by his service in a remarkable array of important capacities, including Acting Director of the Library at a critical time. To all of his duties, as to all of his relationships, Joe brought his humanity, patience, wisdom, sense of responsibility, good humor, and good judgment. He not only earned the respect of his students and colleagues; he earned their affection, and their trust, and their loyalty. He was as good a friend as one could have. A Joseph L. Arnold Memorial Fund has been established at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery to support the Joseph L. Arnold Maryland Collection in the Library’s Special Collections.

Joe Arnold is survived by his wife, Mary Jane, and by their three children and six grandchildren.

Edward K. Spann

Edward K. Spann of Terre Haute died July 5, 2004 in Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis. He was a history professor at Indiana State University for thirty-eight years, during which time he received an award for Research and Creativity and also the Distinguished Professor Award. He is listed in Who’s Who of American Scholars and is recognized as an authority on New York City.

Edward was born on April 12, 1931, in Fairlawn, New Jersey to Hans R. Spann and Gladys Hockenberry Spann. He is survived by his wife, Joanne Ellison Spann, two daughters, a son, and two grandchildren.

Russell F. Weigley

Russell F. Weigley, professor emeritus of American history at Temple University, died at the age of seventy-three on March 3, 2004. He passed away suddenly following a heart attack at his home in Center City, Philadelphia. Russ had just returned from Washington, D.C., where he participated in a meeting sponsored by the American Battle Monuments Commission to plan a memorial and museum for Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, to commemorate Operation Overlord. He is survived by his wife of forty years, Emma Seifrit Weigley, his son Jared, and his daughter Catherine.

A lifelong resident of Pennsylvania, Russ Weigley was born in Reading on July 2, 1930. As a child growing up about seventy miles from the battlefield at Gettysburg, Russ developed an interest in military history. Each year, he accompanied his parents to the battleground, which at that time had no motels or souvenir shops, to distract someone from contemplating the magnitude of the tragedy and the meaning of Lincoln’s words. In making this trip, Weigley followed the route of his great grandparents who visited the battlefield in the summer of 1863 along with thousands of other Pennsylvanians to view the carnage. Russ wrote of the emotions that Gettysburg always held for him. Even when visiting in the summer, “there is always a chill in the air….I know the ghosts.” Growing up in the midst of World War II also influenced his vivid imagination. As a consequence, it surprised no one that Russ chose to become such an imaginative as well as rigorous student of war. Yet, he never glamorized it. Armies, he consistently lectured to his students, “are simply state-organized instruments of mass murder.”

Russ graduated from with a B.A. from Albright College in 1952, and a Ph.D. form the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. He wrote his dissertation under the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Roy F. Nichols. It was published as Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M.C. Meigs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). After receiving his degree, Russ taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1956 to 1958 and from 1958 to 1962 at Drexel University. That fall he joined the faculty at Temple University as an associate professor and remained until his retirement in 1999 as Distinguished University Professor. He also was a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and the United States Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

For thirty-six years, Russ was the heart and soul of the Temple History Department. He was its most important scholar, its premier mentor of graduate students, and one of its most popular undergraduate instructors. Indeed, the numerous awards he received include Temple’s College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching as well as the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the American Military Institute, the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award, and the Lincoln Prize. Russ held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the Society of American Historians, and served as president of the American Military Institute and the Pennsylvania Historical Association. He was the Eighth Holder of the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College Foundation Chair of Military Affairs.

Russ was also an unparalleled citizen of Temple University. He served as chair of the Department of History and director of its graduate program, and he was a member of virtually every significant college and university committee. In addition, he was the cofounder of Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, housed in the History Department. After retiring in 1999, Russ continued to teach two graduate seminars a year and to participate actively in the Center.

These are but the outlines of a remarkably productive career; they do not capture what made his life so special. Russell Weigley left a profound and indelible impression on many scholars of military history, colleagues who worked with him, and undergraduates and graduates who studied under him. He was the author of nine books and editor of three more. Sixty-five of his articles appeared in journals or in books. In addition, he delivered countless invited lectures. Among his most recent books, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award, and A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) received the Lincoln Prize. Perhaps his most important books, nevertheless, were Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), which was nominated for the American Book Award in history in 1983, and The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1973).

Russ remained dedicated to grand narrative. Although he respected recent innovations in historical writing, and his students’ publications reflect both the “new” and “old” military history, Russ always tried to tell a captivating story. Without exception, though, the stories he told added up to the broadest of pictures incorporating both tactics and strategy, both causes and consequences. In the words of John Keegan, “No one who seeks to understand the military history of the United States can do so without consulting the works of Russell F. Weigley.” Although most firmly grounded in American history, he wrote the Age of Battles as the beginning of a three-volume comparative history of modern warfare aimed at understanding the way the modern state has been organized to fight wars. Unfortunately, his premature death denied us his insights from the remaining two volumes of this trilogy as well as from his projected history of the Battle of Gettysburg.

The death of Russ Weigley was a great loss to his many colleagues, friends, and students, and to the historical profession. We will miss his wisdom and the many books that were still to come. But we will miss Russ the person most of all. He was one of those rare individuals who combine a fabulous mind with spirit, humor, and the warmest of hearts. He was an inspiration to us all.

Thomas Winter

Thomas Winter, Assistant Professor American History and Acting Department Chair of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey died of cancer on Tuesday, June 22, 2004. Born in 1961 in Bremen, West Germany, Winter received his B.A. from The Universität Hamburg in Hamburg Germany in 1987. He obtained his M.A. (1990) and Ph.D. (1994) in American history from the University of Cincinnati where Joanne Meyerowitz directed his research. A teacher and scholar for ten years, Thomas taught courses in American studies, gender studies, and race studies and designed and taught pioneering classes in the emerging studies areas of media, memory, identities, and masculinity, in addition to traditional history courses. His research focused on the interaction between constructions of gender and class in identity and specifically on the YMCA (although he hated the song “YMCA”) and male identity formation in the Gilded Age.

Colleagues and friends describe Thomas as scholarly ballast who helped them, with his remarkable knowledge of historiography, to tease out complicated ideas of gender and class and to navigate the often mysterious workings of the historical profession. As a student at Cincinnati, it was very clear to his friends and mentors that Thomas would be an extraordinary teacher and a first-class historian. His passion for his subject, dedication to rigorous research, and inspirational teaching style made him a force in the academy. Although young, Thomas had already garnered accolades from some of the most distinguished historians in his field. He had recently been elected to a three-year term on the council for the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) and was an editor of the H-NET online discussion group, H-SHGAPE.

Thomas’s nimble mind was evident in the genuinely profound connections he found in seemingly disparate ideas. He made connections in scholarship that certainly worked to further interdisciplinarity and served to de-fragmentize the study of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His book, his conference presentations, and his articles helped to legitimize a field of research and an approach to cultural and urban history of which many members of the historical profession had been skeptical. He certainly would have been a giant in his profession, as a scholar, as an editor, and as a teacher.

Winter’s Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920 was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002. Through the YMCA, Thomas investigated middle-class attempts to harmonize relations between management and labor, and he uncovered fascinating evidence of the use of religion, masculinity, and even song to instill class harmony. The book is one of the most innovative studies in the burgeoning history of masculinity and has received praise in the Times Literary Supplement and the Journal of American History. Thomas had also recently begun a new and promising research project on the American social hygiene movement and its impact on the state. It was Winter’s point that the movement focused on the human body as a way to shape the nation. This research will no doubt shape the development of masculinity studies and will inspire scholars to build on Thomas’s ideas.

Thomas was adept at securing private funding, perhaps one indication of the originality of his ideas and the energy with which he pursued his career. Recently he was awarded a grant from the American Philosophical Association to pursue research at the Social Work Archives at the University of Minnesota. He was also the recipient of many other grants. The award of which he was most proud, however, was the Charles Phelps Taft Graduate Fellowship from the University of Cincinnati (1992-1993); being the recipient of the well-respected grant indicated the high esteem in which he was held by his mentors and colleagues.

Winter’s ability and native talent were confirmed by his colleagues and the University administration at Bilkent University when he was promoted to acting department chair of the Department of American Culture and Literature only two years after arriving at the university. As a department chair, he pursued the interests of his colleagues and students vigorously and offered his undivided attention to editorial matters, academic promotions, and scholarship needs while remaining a dedicated husband and father. His style of administration was so efficient and smoothly executed as to make it seem invisible. Those who worked with him at Bilkent have nothing but praise for his professionalism, kindness, support, and good humor. Thomas was a rare kind of academic and administrator; he was open with his ideas and suggestions and enjoyed the challenge of the discussion more than winning the argument. Thomas was both a diplomat and an advocate and was very protective of his department; his colleagues flourished under his care.

Thomas’s commitment to his students was complete. He relished the special challenges raised by teaching American history and American studies to students in Turkey, and he met them with vigor and talent. Before Thomas secured the permanent position at Bilkent University, he supported his family by teaching as an adjunct professor for four years at three different institutions. When interviewed for a documentary on full-time, “part-time” teaching, he emphasized that he wanted the students to know that even though they were being taught by adjunct faculty, they were not receiving an inferior education. This spirit carried over into his teaching in Turkey; he endeavored to provide the absolute best environment for learning that could be found in any academic program anywhere in the world. His direction and uncompromising dedication to quality transformed what could have been a marginalized American studies department into a relevant and vibrant academic community with an international reputation.

Perhaps Thomas’s greatest talent was his ability to maintain a successful career and a rich and loving family life. Rather than finding the two in conflict, Thomas’s enormous energy allowed one to complement and invigorate the other. His commitment to his wife Venitra and sons Rutger and Torbjörn was complete. He was never so happy as when with his family, balancing one of his two sons on his copious shoulders or bending over to kiss their heads as they played around his feet. He was open, funny, engaging, intelligent, serious, loving, direct, and gentle, in short, a man who touched to lives of everyone who ever had the fortune to have met him. His network of friends and colleagues covers three continents and ten time zones. Thomas Winter’s death at such a young age is an immeasurable loss to the academic community and to his friends and family, yet the light of his presence in all of our lives will never be extinguished. His presence is profoundly missed.