In Memoriam |
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William Eugene GienappWilliam Eugene Gienapp, professor of American history at Harvard University, died on October 29, 2003, after a long battle with cancer. Bill was born in Denton, Texas, on February 27, 1944. He grew up in rural Iowa, where his father was a teacher-superintendent of a small country school. Bill’s love of sports came from the schoolyard, and his deep understanding of Americana came from his fellow pupils, many descended from Iowa farmers who had fought in the Civil War. In Bill’s early teens, the family moved to Orange County, California, where his father headed a suburban school district. He described his childhood as an idyllic combination of rural wholesomeness followed by urban sophistication. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, Bill studied physics and computer science. Although more a scholar than an activist, he joined the sit-in during the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Bill, however, got hungry and left Sproul Hall to eat dinner. When he returned, the doors were locked, and he missed being among the 773 arrestees. In 1965, he took a Reconstruction Era seminar with Professor Kenneth Stampp that changed his life—he met his wife Erica and discovered his calling. After receiving his history degree in 1967 he entered graduate school at Yale University. Yale, however, did not fit Bill’s interests, and in 1969 he returned to Berkeley to study with Stampp, who became both mentor and friend. In the 1970s, Bill taught his fellow graduate students a lot about quantitative methods, the Civil War, and American politics, both past and present. Determined to be thorough in his dissertation research, Bill and Erica made a sixteen-month trip around the country to read manuscripts. The resulting 1980 dissertation explained how the political system during the 1850s had unraveled and then had been reshaped. To anyone who lived in Berkeley in the years of Watergate and Patty Hearst, political upheaval ran close to the surface. Bill’s understanding of complex issues was aided by his unusual capacity for mastering secondary literature and his total recall of everything that he had ever read. He published his dissertation as The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). This remarkable synthesis blended information from newspapers, private letters, and new quantitative techniques to provide both detailed state-by-state analysis and methodologically sophisticated statistical tables. A brilliant composite portrait of an emerging new political structure, it set a standard for political history and won the OAH’s Avery Craven Award. After teaching at the University of Wyoming for nine years, Bill moved to Harvard in 1989. He was the first tenured professor of American history hired in two decades, a tribute to his brilliance, his political skills, and his personality. At Harvard, he undertook heavy responsibilities. A devoted teacher, adviser, and mentor, he found himself in his first years supervising senior theses in women’s history. Recognizing the emergence of a new field, he worked hard in his usual quiet way to bring Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to Harvard. Much of his work was behind the scenes; one year he served on twelve search committees. When colleagues proved difficult, he did not argue but went home to cut firewood with a chainsaw. Some stumps, he observed, remarkably resembled certain individuals. Bill coauthored a successful textbook, Nation of Nations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990). His section showed unusual attention to detail. For example, he used little-known railroad timetables to create a map of the United States illustrating various railroad gauges in 1860. Bill’s short biography, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), was based on massive primary research and yet distills this most complex of presidents into essentials. This deceptively simple book, designed for classroom use, is filled with deft sentences that incorporate shrewd conclusions based upon wide and deep knowledge. At the same time, he edited a companion volume, This Fiery Trial: The Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Bill probably had a greater understanding of the Civil War and mastery of its vast primary and secondary literature than anyone of his generation. In 2000, Harvard honored Bill’s devotion to undergraduates by naming him a professor of Harvard College. After his death, The Harvard Crimson called him “beloved.” He taught a large, award-winning course on the Civil War, as well as a popular course on baseball in which he wore a different team cap, drawn from his personal collection, to each lecture. A Red Sox and Patriots fan, Bill once said that had he been free to choose any occupation, he would have been a National Football League, Hall of Fame quarterback. Bill is survived by his wife Erica of Lincoln, Massachusetts, and two sons, William and Jonathan. We shall miss his intelligence, originality, wisdom, wit, and unique throaty laugh. W. J. Rorabaugh Douglas Edward LeachDouglas Edward Leach, professor emeritus of history at Vanderbilt University, died at home in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 1, 2003. Doug, who was eighty-three, succumbed to leukemia after a battle of twenty-two years. A Rhode Islander, Doug grew up in Providence and graduated from Cranston High School and Brown University, where he earned election to Phi Beta Kappa and honors in English (1942). After wartime military service, he earned the MA and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Doug taught for six years at Bates College, followed by thirty years at Vanderbilt University, from which he retired in l986. While at Vanderbilt, Doug Leach was awarded Fulbright lectureships at the University of Liverpool (England) and the University of Auckland (New Zealand). He also taught at the University of Leeds, where he served as Resident Director of Vanderbilt-in-England. Doug received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and at Vanderbilt was named Harvey Branscomb Distinguished Professor, 1981-1982, in recognition of his “creative scholarship,” “stimulating and inspiring teaching,” and “service to students, colleagues, the university . . . and society at large.” Among Doug’s many contributions to his colleagues was a three-year term as department chair. Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus Paul Conkin spoke for all of us who worked with Doug when he eulogized him as “a kind man, sensitive to the feelings of others. He exemplified the moral integrity, strength of character and religious concerns that so marked his New England progenitors.” Doug Leach’s scholarship illuminated the American colonies and interactions among colonials, Native Americans, and Britons, especially in military affairs. His major works were Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York: Norton, 1966); The Northern Colonial Frontier, 1607-1763 (New York: Macmillan, 1958); Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607-1763 (New York: Macmillan, 1973); and Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). He also wrote numerous scholarly articles. Doug’s account of service on a destroyer escort, Now Hear This: The Memoir of a Junior Naval Officer in the Great Pacific War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987), earned him the John Lyman Book Award, North American Society for Oceanic History. A memorial service for Doug was held at Calvary United Methodist Church. He is survived by his wife of fifty-three years, Brenda Mason Leach; two children, Carol Leach-Morehead and Brad R. Leach; and sister, Marilyn Schmid. Samuel T. McSeveney John K. MahonJohn K. Mahon, distinguished historian and longtime chair of the University of Florida history department, died on Oct. 11, at the age of ninety-one. He was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, on February 8, 1912, and attended Swarthmore College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1934. He acted as secretary and treasurer in the family wholesale grocery business from 1934 until 1942. He was then “selected by his neighbors,” as he liked to put it, and served in the field artillery in the United States Army in Europe during World War II and was discharged as a captain in 1945. After the war, Mahon received the opportunity he had been waiting for to return to academia. He did his graduate work at U.C.L.A. and received his Ph.D. in history in 1950. Mahon worked as interim instructor in U. S. History at U.C.L.A. and at Colorado A & M. College (now Colorado State University). From 1951 to 1954, he served as Civilian Military Historian in the Office of the Chief of Military History in Washington, D.C. In 1954, he accepted a teaching position in the history department at the University of Florida. His interest in military history and in Florida’s Seminole Indians led to such important books as, The History of the Second Seminole War (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1967), The War of 1812 (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1972),and The History of the Militia and National Guard (New York: Macmillan, 1983), as well as numerous articles for encyclopedias and historical journals. The first two books have remained in print these many years. In 1965, he was promoted to chairman of the history department, a position he held until 1973. Mahon retired from the university in 1982. The annual John K. Mahon Undergraduate Teaching Award was endowed in his honor. After retirement, Mahon remained active as a historian, but he also became deeply involved as an environmentalist and social activist. He helped start the Alachua Audubon Society and Florida Defenders of the Environment. He was past president of the local chapter of the Sierra Club. He was past president of the Florida Historical Society and board member of the Seminole Wars Historic Foundation. John K. Mahon’s boundless energy and commitment to good causes remain a source of inspiration to all who knew him. John K. Mahon III
Raymond MuseRaymond Muse, eighty-eight, long-time chair of the Washington State University history department, died October 28, in San Diego, after a long illness. Muse dedicated himself to educational leadership as a department chair and an unmatched undergraduate classroom teacher, and to sophisticated, scholarly graduate training. Although warm, relaxed and outgoing in personality, he had an intense passion to share the camaraderie of learning with his colleagues and students alike. Not one to stand on the sidelines, he was totally committed to the welfare of his university, his community, the world around him, and humankind in general. Muse was born on a farm in Webster County, Missouri, on September 24, 1915. He graduated from Marshfield High School, where he was a champion debater, in 1932. He began teaching at a one-room country school near Marshfield. The school board adjusted its school year so that Muse could spend part of the year attending Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, from which he graduated in 1938. Muse taught from 1938 to 1940 at the Pipkin School in Springfield, before a mentor suggested that Muse could be an outstanding college professor. He not only encouraged Muse, but gained him admission to the Stanford University graduate program in 1940. He received his MA in 1943. Muse entered the military in November 1942 and served with the 91st Division as a traffic analyst and cryptoanalyst in Asia, primarily in Delhi, India. In the fall of 1946, Muse returned to Stanford to complete his Ph.D. His dissertation, which he wrote under the direction of Max Savelle and Edgar Eugene Robinson, evaluated the work of William Douglass, a physician and historian in colonial America. In fall 1948, Muse became an instructor in the Department of History and Political Science at WSU. By 1956, he had become chair of the newly-formed Department of History, a position he held until his retirement in 1979, by which time it was ranked among the top 15 percent of history departments in the US. When he retired, Muse had been chair of a department longer than anyone else in WSU history. He also played a major role in the creation of the American Studies program at WSU. In August 1969, Muse married Marianne Johnson, widow of a long-time family friend. He asked her eldest son for her hand at the 1969 OAH convention in Philadelphia. He relished the “instant family” her three sons provided him. Today, two of them are practicing historians, one academic and one public. Two of his grandchildren have also earned history degrees. Muse had a national reputation among colleagues who knew him as a “consummate” department chair, thanks to his ability to know all the buttons to press. Despite administration demands for heavier teaching assignments, he arranged reduced loans for those with research and service commitments. When he went to meetings, other chairs cornered him and asked him how he handled this departmental crisis or typical administrators. As the supreme tribute for a chair, deans and vice-presidents often sought his advice. Muse’s strong suit was the ability to cast a rosy glow on the direst conditions or the gloomiest prospects and make a person or an entire department feel good about themselves. He could also be a scathing critic of those trying to water down the traditional requirements for degrees or turn the faculty away from scholarly approaches. Above all, Muse was a humanist who fought for his colleagues, friends and causes dear to him. He was a fervent supporter of civil liberties and free speech, demonstrated best perhaps by his testimony in the landmark John Goldmark libel case in 1964. The eighth floor of Orton Hall dormitory on the WSU campus is named in Muse’s honor, as is the history office at WSU. Owen V. Johnson |
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