In Memoriam

Peter J. Coleman

Peter Jarrett Coleman, emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a member of OAH for forty-nine years, died on March 9, 2004 in his home town of Wellington, New Zealand, after a short illness. He was a few days short of his seventy-eighth birthday.

Peter Coleman was a genuine trailblazer in that, after completing his M.A. in history at the Victoria University of Wellington in 1949, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Texas, the first history postgraduate to depart from the traditional route to the United Kingdom. As such, his was an example which many others have subsequently followed. Unable to find a teaching post in New Zealand upon graduation, he embarked on a teaching career in North America which took him to Manitoba, Nebraska, Missouri, and Detroit before settling in Illinois. He became professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1973, a position he held until his retirement in 1986. During this time he also served as Associate Dean of the Graduate College. From 1962 to 1966 he interrupted his teaching career to accept a position as book editor with the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Peter published more than twenty articles on aspects of the economic, legal, and political history of both the United States and New Zealand during his distinguished career, but is best remembered for his three substantial and significant books, The Transformation of Rhode Island, 1790-1860 (Brown University Press, 1963), Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency and Imprisonment for Debt and Bankruptcy, 1607-1900 (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1974), and Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University Press of Kansas, 1987). He also contributed more than three hundred book reviews to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

Carol Green-Ramirez

Carol (Devens) Green-Ramirez, professor of history at Central Michigan University, died December 22, 2003. She was fifty-one years old. Green-Ramirez distinguished herself as a teacher, editor, and scholar. After earning her Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 1986, she taught four years at Rhodes College, then spent the 1990-1991 academic year at Harvard Divinity School as a research associate and visiting scholar. At Central Michigan University, where she began teaching in 1991, her large, often oversubscribed undergraduate classes in U.S. women’s history and Native American history, broadened and changed students’ understandings. A thoughtful and well-read educator, Carol was not content with her natural gifts as a teacher but worked steadily to become even better at her craft. She excelled at guiding graduate students into serious research and supervised Wendy M. Gordon’s dissertation, the first to be completed in the joint doctoral program that Central Michigan University shares with the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and the first to reach print as a book.

Green-Ramirez also fostered and promoted other scholars’ work through her editorship of the Michigan Historical Review. Assuming her post in 1992 when the Review was experiencing difficulties, she secured a flow of high-quality submissions, expanded the journal’s size and coverage, and organized special issues on Americans Indians and on the automotive industry. When Carol decided to return to full-time teaching in 1998, she left the Review in excellent condition and presented her successor with the perfect gift: a year’s backlog of good articles.

Green-Ramirez’s own scholarship was innovative. A 1986 article in American Quarterly, “Separate Confrontations: Gender as a Factor in Indian Adaptation to European Colonization in New France,” announced her important work on the intersection of cultural adaptation and gender history. A book followed in 1992, Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900, published by the University of California Press and widely praised by reviewers as an important contribution to Native American history. As the reviewer in the Journal of American History noted, the book succeeded “admirably on several levels” and showed historians and anthropologists “how fruitful an analysis based on gender can be.” Green-Ramirez then began extensive research on women missionaries in the nineteenth-century American West. An early result was her article, “‘If We Get the Girls, We Get the Race’: Missionary Education of Native American Girls,” in the Journal of World History. A variety of presentations at major scholarly conferences followed, indicating the range and depth of her work in progress. Most recently, her research focused on Anishinaabe women’s roles in community leadership.

Carol had just begun her courses this fall semester when a seemingly minor medical problem led to a diagnosis of cancer. Carol struggled courageously, supported by her husband, Professor Benjamin Ramirez-Shkwegnaabi, her son, Aric Devens, and her five sisters, as well as other relatives and friends. Historical scholarship will be poorer for the work she could not complete. Central Michigan University’s history department has lost a thoughtful and engaged teacher; those who knew Carol have lost, but will remember, her moral fervor, wit, intelligence, and personal kindness.

Stanley Hirshson

Stanley Hirshson of the history department at Queens College died on December 26, 2003. Stanley joined the department in 1963 and quickly established himself as one of its leading scholars. He had already published his first book, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), a study of the post-Reconstruction Republican Party, and would go on to publish four more books. Early in his career, he published biographies of Grenville Dodge and Brigham Young. Later, he published biographies of General William Sherman and General George Patton. The latter, the definitive biography of the controversial general, brought him well-deserved national attention with several television appearances on book discussion shows.

Within the department, Stanley was a dedicated teacher. He was especially good at introducing students to the joys and intricacies of historical research in his undergraduate and graduate seminars. As a result, more graduate students chose to work under him on their M.A. theses than with any other member of the department. Stanley was a very private person, but he enjoyed talking military history with his students; often he spent several hours in his office chatting with them. With his colleagues, he enjoyed exchanging stories and anecdotes about research travel and debating baseball history. Although as a loyal Brooklyn Dodger fan, I could not share his devotion to the Yankees (rooted in his childhood and the Newark Bears of Charlie Keller), I had to admit that he knew his baseball lore. Above all, Stanley was a person whose love of historical research and love of his family best defined his person. His colleagues and the departmental staff knew him as a kind, thoughtful, and generous person on whom they could always rely. He is survived by his wife, Janet, and his son, Scott.

Henry D. Shapiro

Henry D. Shapiro, scholar of the life of the mind in America and teacher of friends and students died on January 21, 2004, of lung cancer. Born in New York City in 1937, Shapiro entered the profession just as American intellectual historians were questioning the vitality of their approach. At Columbia and then Cornell, Shapiro quickly exhibited the virtues of meticulous research and precise exposition. His M.A. thesis and first publication, Confiscation of Confederate Property in the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), won the Moses Coit Tyler Prize at Cornell in 1961.

Shapiro’s appreciation of method, especially the relationships among culture and the perceived past, led him to follow the then young Warren Susman to Rutgers. While completing his dissertation, Shapiro accepted an instructorship in 1963 at Ohio State University where he met roughly three dozen other ABDs—all hired to handle the unprecedented demand of the baby boom generation. The young scholars quickly made enduring friendships and engaged in intellectual interchanges. With tongue firmly in cheek, the intellectually omnivorous and remarkably imaginative Shapiro and some of his colleagues planned an intellectual history of the United States from the viewpoint of Columbus, Ohio. Shapiro even shopped the idea to publishers before tiring of the joke.

In 1966, the year that he received his Ph.D., the University of Cincinnati hired Shapiro to teach American intellectual history and the history of science. He quickly discovered in the life of the physician-naturalist-entrepreneur-city booster Daniel Drake an apt means to combine his two passions. More importantly, he met his lifelong intellectual sidekick, collaborator and friend, Zane L. Miller. Together these “young turks” set out to refashion the university and to open new historical vistas. Drake, reputed founder of the university, became the touchstone for encouraging the university to preserve and explore its history. Shapiro directed the new medical history archives and labored to get Cincinnati to hire a medical historian. He also developed collections for other parts of the university’s past, such as the Ohio Mechanics Institute.

The mercurial Shapiro provided much of the intellectual basis, while Miller masterfully worked out implications as well as sharpened insights. Their collaboration first resulted in the coedited Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science & Society (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971). In this and other efforts, method dominated their discussions. Shapiro was smitten with French structuralism from Levi-Strauss to Foucault, who showed that it was human to taxonimize reality. Shapiro concluded that what held together human societies at various times and places was sharing similar taxonomies. It was in the context of those shared taxonomies that public action took place.

This exciting revelation focused attention directly on cultural ideas. It was cultural ideas—taxonomies of reality perceived in a particular way—that both “caused” conditions and situations, some of which may have been longstanding, to become seen as problems that demanded amelioration as well as circumscribed the arena and methods by which amelioration could successfully occur. Among other things, that understanding posited race, gender, class, religion and the rest not as universal social forces or constructs but rather products of culture. And like cultures themselves, these products were temporal, the product of certain specific taxonomies.

To Shapiro, the use of culture in this manner rescued intellectual history from its malaise. It accentuated the ideas themselves, not the cultural-social demographics of their genesis. After a year at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center, Shapiro and Miller created the Laboratory in American Civilization. Patterned in spirit after the Chicago School of Sociology’s “the City as Laboratory,” the Shapiro/Miller effort took Cincinnati as its locus only because they were there. Events in Cincinnati were “symptomatic”—indicative but neither identical nor extraordinary—of what happened elsewhere in America at the similar time. Undergraduates learned about history by doing history. Working with graduate students, each did original research on some relatively minor act at a certain time in Cincinnati. Later lab discussions put those apparently discrete acts together—why those events or acts were done in that way at that time and how they might have changed at later times. Clifton: Neighborhood and Community in an Urban Setting (1976) became the first lab product.

Shapiro’s insistence on culture as a central project in intellectual history emphasized place and the bonds that categorized it. He recognized, however, that interpretation of place was itself a cultural construct. He was fascinated by the idea of place, the idea of regionalism and regional identity and the idea of otherness rather than the fact of those designations. Nowhere was this truer than in his seminal Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), which was published as Shapiro filled a Fulbright scholarship in Berlin. What started as his dissertation fifteen years earlier, Shapiro began with this caveat: “This is not a history of Appalachia. It is a history of the idea of Appalachia, and therefore the invention of Appalachia.” Here the analysis focuses on how Appalachia emerged as a strange land and peculiar people and how Americans using that construct acted through it in an effort to understand American civilization.

Ironically, Shapiro emerged as a major figure among scholars of Appalachia as identity politics took charge. Always nattily attired in a three-piece wool suit and blue oxford cloth shirt no matter the season, the full-bearded Shapiro sat on the board of Appalachian Journal, wrote introductions to various collections and volumes and reviewed countless others. His Appalachia on Our Mind remains in print some twenty-six years after its initial publication.

Fascination with the idea of place dominated Shapiro’s thinking as he continued his fruitful collaboration with Miller. Together they formed the University of Cincinnati’s Center for Neighborhood and Community Studies and edited the Urban Life and Landscape series for Ohio State University Press. Forty titles have been published there. Shapiro’s life took a dark turn in 1986 when his wife Nancy succumbed to leukemia, leaving their three sons. In a symbolic and actual break with his past, Shapiro retired in 1988. He married Genevieve Ray and soon moved to Cleveland. In 2002, they relocated to York, Pennsylvania, and began work with the York Foundation. At the time of his death, Shapiro was writing an intellectual biography of the philosopher Harry A. Wolfson.